Play alone or together - truthful and efficient routing in wireless ad hoc networks with selfish nodes

A wealth of research proposals in ad hoc networks has been seen on the problem of routing along power efficient paths. However they do not take into account the interests of individual nodes. Managed by different profit-oriented entities, network nodes can no longer be assumed to cooperate with each other. Incentive-compatible routing seems to be more realistic to deal with selfish nodes in ad hoc networks. We propose the transmission power recursive auction mechanism (TEAM) routing protocol to prevent the selfish behavior and stimulate cooperative work from the game theoretic approach. It pays nodes for their services and makes cheating not attractive. Interests of nodes are best served if they only reveal true information. With some assumptions the truthfulness of TEAM can be proved. We present a theoretical bound of the power efficiency of TEAM protocol. It is also shown that, compared to another truthful routing protocol, Ad hoc-VCG, TEAM reduces the message complexity significantly.