Enhancing cooperation with multiple stage auctions in opportunistic routing for wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic routing significantly increases throughput in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) by utilizing the wireless broadcast medium. Most opportunistic routing protocols assume all nodes are cooperative. But in WMNs, one realistic problem is that nodes perform in their own interests and refuse to forward packets for other nodes. Game theory approach is an efficient way used in routing protocol to incentive nodes to forward other's packets. In this paper, we develop an auction incentive mechanism (AIM) for WMNs with opportunistic routing to encourage cooperation and balance energy consumption between nodes. In AIM, a fair pricing mechanism is used to incentive nodes and the pricing process is modeled as auction game reached Bayesian Nash equilibrium which maximizes the profit of each relay node. The energy status and throughput are considered in the bidding process; this not only ensures the high throughput but also balances the energy cost to reduce invalid nodes. Simulations are presented to complement our theoretical and evaluation results demonstrate its high performance in terms of stability, throughput and fairness.