— In autonomous mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) where each user is its own authority, fully cooperative behaviors, such as unconditionally forwarding packets for each other or, honestly revealing its private information, cannot be directly assumed. The pricing mechanism is one way to provide incentives for the users to act cooperatively by rewarding some payment for cooperative behaviors. In this paper, we model the pricing and routing as multi-stage dynamic games. By taking into consideration that the packet-forwarding will incur a cost to the relay user and the successful transmission brings benefits to the sender/receiver, we propose a dynamic pricing framework to maximize the sender/receiver’s payoff by considering the dynamic nature of MANETs, meanwhile, keeping the forwarding incentives of the relay nodes by providing the optimal payments based on the auction rules. The contributions of this paper are multi-folds: Firstly, by modeling the pricing and routing as a dynamic game...
Zhu Ji, Wei Yu, K. J. Ray Liu