  In this paper, we investigate joint optimal relay selection and resource
allocation under bandwidth exchange (BE) enabled incentivized cooperative
forwarding in wireless networks. We consider an autonomous network where N
nodes transmit data in the uplink to an access point (AP) / base station (BS).
We consider the scenario where each node gets an initial amount (equal, optimal
based on direct path or arbitrary) of bandwidth, and uses this bandwidth as a
flexible incentive for two hop relaying. We focus on alpha-fair network utility
maximization (NUM) and outage reduction in this environment. Our contribution
is two-fold. First, we propose an incentivized forwarding based resource
allocation algorithm which maximizes the global utility while preserving the
initial utility of each cooperative node. Second, defining the link weight of
each relay pair as the utility gain due to cooperation (over noncooperation),
we show that the optimal relay selection in alpha-fair NUM reduces to the
maximum weighted matching (MWM) problem in a non-bipartite graph. Numerical
results show that the proposed algorithms provide 20- 25% gain in spectral
efficiency and 90-98% reduction in outage probability.
