AIM: An Auction Incentive Mechanism in Wireless Networks with Opportunistic Routing

Opportunistic routing in wireless networks has strong requirement with nodes´ cooperation. But in most realistic networks, nodes perform in their own interests and refuse to forward packets for others when they belong to different organizations. The aim of this paper is to provide a fair incentive mechanism to encourage cooperation and achieve the energy efficient. We propose an auction incentive mechanism (AIM) using a fair pricing mechanism to incentive nodes and modeling the pricing process as an auction game. Furthermore, we proof that, this game has a Bayesian Nash equilibrium point, and the profit of each relay node can be maximized when the game reached Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Our simulation results show that the AIM can effectively incentive network nodes to relay data, so that the network throughput could be improved. And the energy consuming of nodes is balanced that enhances the stability of networks.