A queuing model-based incentive scheme for optimal data transmission in wireless networks with selfish nodes

Data transmission in self-organized multi-hop networks heavily depends on the cooperation among nodes. In many applications, however, the autonomous nodes exhibit selfish behaviors, aiming to optimize their own performance without consideration of other nodes in the network. Although a selfish node is interested in transmitting its own data only, part of its resource has to be traded for the cooperation of other nodes in the network, in order to establish a routing path through them to deliver data to its destination. In this paper, we propose a stimulating mechanism to encourage cooperation among the selfish nodes. Specifically, a credit-based Markov chain model is established to analyze the packet dropping probability, with given total bandwidth, bandwidth allocation, buffer space, and the maximum credit of each node. Based on the Markovian model, bandwidth allocation is optimized so that the dropping probability of a node’s own packets is minimum. It is a main contribution of this work to address the bandwidth constraint, which is a key resource in wireless networks but has been ignored in all existing incentive schemes. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the proposed incentive scheme, and the simulation results show that it can effectively enable cooperation among selfish nodes and minimize overall packet dropping probability.