Addressing forwarder's dilemma: A game-theoretic approach to induce cooperation in a multi-hop wireless network

Abstract

Nodes in a multi-hop wireless network often have limited or constrained resources. Therefore, to increase their lifetime, intermediate nodes are often unwilling to forward packets for other nodes, thereby decreasing network throughput. Thus, some mechanism has to be designed which prevents the nodes from adopting such selfish behavior. In this paper, we suggest a scheme using game theory to induce such cooperation. The nodes are the players and their strategies are their packet forwarding probabilities. We design novel utility functions to capture the characteristics of packet forwarding dilemma. We then set up simulations to analyze the Nash equilibrium points of the game. We show that cooperation in multi-hop communication is feasible at the operating point if the costs of packet forwarding are not too high. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.