Truthful Multicast in Selfish Wireless Networks

Abstract

In wireless network, it is often assumed that each individual wireless terminal or link will faithfully follow the prescribed protocols without any deviation – except, perhaps, for the faulty or malicious ones. Wireless terminals or links, often owned by individuals, will likely do what is most beneficial to their owners – act “selfishly”. Thus, it is more reasonable to expect that each selfish terminal will try to manipulate the algorithms or protocols for its owners ’ benefit, instead faithfully follow the designed protocols. Therefore, an algorithm or protocol intended for selfish wireless terminals or links must be designed. In this paper, we specifically study how to conduct efficient multicast in selfish wireless networks. We assume that each wireless terminal or communication link (called agent) will incur a cost when it transits some data, and the cost is known to the wireless terminal or communication link itself. For each of the widely used structures for multicast, we design a strategyproof multicast mechanism without using the well known VCG mechanism such that each agent has to truthfully report its cost to maximize its profit. Extensive simulations are conducted to study the practical performances of the proposed protocols regarding the actually network cost and total payment