A Truthful and Capacity-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Cooperative Networks.

In wireless sensor networks, capacity is one of the most important performance metrics for a routing path. Lots of researchers have paid special attention on improving this capacity performance. A promising technology, Cooperative Communication, can match this requirement. One of the fundamental assumptions in cooperative communication is that each node should be unselfish, truthful, responsible and willing to forwarding received data. However, in practical environments, because of limited resources, each node hates participating in data transmission without any incentive. Even if nodes can get rewards for their cooperation, they are greedy and try to get more by cheating. In this paper, a reward-efficient mechanism is designed to stimulate nodes to cooperate and act in a truthful manner. To show the efficiency of this reward mechanism, we prove that if this reward mechanism is used, unselfishness and truthfulness can be guaranteed. Even when nodes behave in a truthful manner, the selection of forwarding nodes and cooperative nodes for data transmission is still a NPhard problem. A relaY nodE Assignment algoritHm(YEAH) is provided to solve this selection problem. The analysis shows that this algorithm can reach the approximate performance ratio of 2. The numerical results indicate that in a 100-node network, if nodes work truthfully, the minimal capacity on a selected routing path can increase by 14.42% on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]