Channel-relay price pair: Towards arbitrating incentives in wireless ad hoc networks

Cooperation in wireless ad hoc networks has twofold implications. First, each wireless node does not excessively and greedily inject traffic to the shared wireless channel. Second, intermediate nodes voluntarily relay traffic for upstream nodes towards the destination at the cost of its own private resource. Such an assumption supports almost all existing research when it comes to protocol design in ad hoc networks. We believe that without appropriate incentive mechanisms, the nodes are inherently selfish (unwilling to contribute its private resource to relay traffic) and greedy (unfairly sharing the wireless channel). In this paper, we present a price pair mechanism to arbitrate resource allocation and to provide incentives simultaneously such that cooperation is promoted and the desired global optimal network operating point is reached by convergence with a fully decentralized self-optimizing algorithm. Such desired network-wide global optimum is characterized with the concept of Nash bargaining solution (NBS), which not only provides the Pareto optimal point for the network, but is also consistent with the fairness axioms of game theory. We simulate the price pair mechanism and report encouraging results to support and validate our theoretical claims.