  In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic framework for studying the
problem of minimizing the completion time of instantly decodable network coding
(IDNC) for cooperative data exchange (CDE) in decentralized wireless network.
In this configuration, clients cooperate with each other to recover the erased
packets without a central controller. Game theory is employed herein as a tool
for improving the distributed solution by overcoming the need for a central
controller or additional signaling in the system. We model the session by
self-interested players in a non-cooperative potential game. The utility
function is designed such that increasing individual payoff results in a
collective behavior achieving both a desirable system performance in a shared
network environment and the Pareto optimal solution. Through extensive
simulations, our approach is compared to the best performance that could be
found in the conventional point-to-multipoint (PMP) recovery process. Numerical
results show that our formulation largely outperforms the conventional PMP
scheme in most practical situations and achieves a lower delay.
