Low-cost truthful multicast in selfish and rational wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

It is conventionally assumed that all wireless devices will follow the prescribed routing protocols without any deviation. However, the scarcity of resources in wireless devices raises a concern about this assumption. Most often, instead of faithfully following the protocols, the owners of wireless devices will try to manipulate the protocols for their own benefits. We specifically study the multicast in selfish and rational wireless ad hoc networks. By assuming that each wireless node has a private cost of forwarding data for other nodes, we first give an efficient method to construct a multicast tree, namely VMST, whose cost is a 5-approximation of the optimum multicast tree's cost for homogeneous wireless networks. We then design a truthful payment scheme that pays minimum for any relay node among all truthful payment schemes based on VMST.