On achieving group strategyproof information dissemination in wireless networks

We study the dissemination of common information from a source to multiple peers within a multihop wireless network, where peers are equipped with uniform omni-directional antennas and have a fixed cost per packet transmission. While many peers may be interested in the dissemination service, their valuation or utility for such a service is usually private information. A desirable routing and charging mechanism encourages truthful utility reports from the peers. We provide both negative and positive results towards such mechanism design. We show that in order to achieve the group strategy proof property, a compromise in routing optimality or budget-balance is inevitable. In particular, the fraction of optimal routing cost that can be recovered through peer charges cannot be significantly higher than frac12. To answer the question whether constant-ratio cost recovery is possible, we further apply a primal-dual schema to simultaneously build a routing solution and a cost sharing scheme, and prove that the resulting mechanism is group strategy-proof and guarantees frac18-approximate cost recovery against an optimal routing scheme.