In cooperative communications, employing the idle relay node for forwarding data can effectively improve the transmission rate and performance of the wireless networks. Therefore, various relay node selection algorithms are proposed. However, most of the existing algorithms just focus on the benefit caused by relay nodes, while ignoring the negative effect of the backoff duration time which does not exist in direct transmission, when more than one flow compete for the same relay node. To this end, considering both advantage and adverse impact caused by the relay node, we adopt the game-theoretic approach and propose a cooperative transmission strategy based on the Nash equilibrium, named the Nash Equilibrium Cooperative Transmission Strategy (NECTS). The NECTS can not only guarantee the gain of each flow, but also maximize the system performance, and improve the system throughput effectively. Simulation results show that the NECTS can take the advantage of cooperative communications. Meanwhile, it can avoid the unnecessary competition, and its performance outperforms that of the existing methods.
