modelling incentives and protocols for collaboration in mobile ad hoc networks
Ad hoc networks are self-configuring networks of mobile nodes, connected by wireless links. If a destination node is beyond the transmission range of an origin node, then the nodes must cooperate to provide a multi-hop route. Any node can act as a sender, receiver or transit node. It is in a node's interest to be a sender or receiver, but it is less clear what the value is of forwarding traffic on behalf of other nodes. The nodes should therefore be given incentives to act as transit nodes, because otherwise the network would fail to function. A way to do so is by introducing for each node a credit balance, where nodes use credits to pay for the costs of sending their own traffic, and earn credits by forwarding traffic from other nodes. The incentive scheme requires that the information needed to compute the credit balance at each node must be locally available at the node. In this paper we present a model of a signalling protocol that obtains and distributes the prices that the nodes charge for processing flows so that the credit balances can be locally computed at each node. Simulation experiments show that the protocol can efficiently gather and distribute the control information such that effective flow allocation takes place for reasonable values of the signalling rate and signal processing delays.
mobile ad hoc networks self-organization incentives for collaboration distributed control scalability congestion prices