Routing game in hybrid wireless mesh networks with selfish mesh clients

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) consist of mesh routers and mesh clients where fixed mesh routers form the multi-hop backbone of the network. It is often assumed that each individual mesh client will faithfully follow the prescribed protocols. However, these mobile devices, owned by individual users, will likely do what is the most beneficial to their owners, i.e. act 'selfishly'. In this article, we study how to design routing protocols in WMNs with selfish mesh clients. We first show that the totalpayment of the classical Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG)-based routing protocol could be very expensive and inefficient for hybrid mesh networks. Then, we modify the VCG-based method to make it more efficient in terms of total payment, but we also prove that mesh clients could lie about their costs in this modified method. Instead of the VCG-based method, we then propose a novel routing protocol that could achieve Nash equilibrium with low total payments.