A game theoretical framework for dynamic pricing-based routing in self-organized MANETs

In self-organized mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) where each user is its own authority, fully cooperative behaviors, such as unconditionally forwarding packets for each other or honestly revealing its private information, cannot be directly assumed. The pricing mechanism is one way to provide incentives for the users to act cooperatively by awarding some payment for cooperative behaviors. In this paper, we consider efficient routing in self-organized MANETs and model it as multi-stage dynamic pricing games. A game theoretical framework for dynamic pricing-based routing in MANETs is proposed to maximize the sender/receiver's payoff by considering the dynamic nature of MANETs. Meanwhile, the forwarding incentives of the relay nodes can also be maintained by optimally pricing their packet-forwarding services based on the auction rules and introducing the Cartel Maintenance enforcing mechanism. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed dynamic pricing-based routing approach has significant performance gains over the existing static pricing approaches.