Contract Theory-Based Incentive Mechanism for Full Duplex Cooperative NOMA with SWIPT Communication Networks

Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT) communication can not only effectively improve the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency of wireless networks but also extend their coverage. An important design issue is to incentivize a full duplex (FD) relaying center user to participate in the cooperative process and achieve a win–win situation for both the base station (BS) and the center user. Some private information of the center users are hidden from the BS in the network. A contract theory-based incentive mechanism under this asymmetric information scenario is applied to incentivize the center user to join the cooperative communication to maximize the BS’s benefit utility and to guarantee the center user’s expected payoff. In this work, we propose a matching theory-based Gale–Shapley algorithm to obtain the optimal strategy with low computation complexity in the multi-user pairing scenario. Simulation results indicate that the network performance of the proposed FD cooperative NOMA and SWIPT communication is much better than the conventional NOMA communication, and the benefit utility of the BS with the stable match strategy is nearly close to the multi-user pairing scenario with complete channel state information (CSI), while the center users get the satisfied expected payoffs.