Incentive-compatible opportunistic routing for wireless networks

Abstract

User-contributed wireless mesh networks are a disruptive technology that may fundamentally change the economics of edge network access and bring the benefits of a computer network infrastructure to local communities at low cost, anywhere in the world. To achieve high throughput despite highly unpredictable and lossy wireless channels, it is essential that such networks take advantage of transmission opportunities wherever they emerge. However, as opportunistic routing departs from the traditional but less effective deterministic, shortest-path based routing, user nodes in such networks may have less incentive to follow protocols and contribute. In this paper, we present the first routing protocols in which it is incentive-compatible for each user node to honestly participate in the routing despite opportunistic transmissions. We not only rigorously prove the properties of our protocols but also thoroughly evaluate a complete implementation of our protocols. Experiments show that there is a 5.8%-58.0% gain in throughput when compared with an opportunistic routing protocol that does not provide incentives and users can act selfishly.