On Collecting Underlying Topology in the Selfish Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A feasible way to stimulate cooperation in the selfish ad hoc networks is to reimburse the forwarding service providers for their cost. However, to get more payments and maximize their utility, selfish nodes may lie about their cost. This poses the requirement of truth protocol. Up to now, the VCG mechanism is the only truthful mechanism for the least cost path (LCP) problem. But the dynamic topology of mobile ad hoc network makes it very difficulty to apply VCG mechanism. We propose a novel and efficient method to gather the topology information of selfish ad hoc networks. Based on this method, we propose a low overhead truthful energy-efficient routing protocol called LOTER. In LOTER, the node collects its neighbors' information. The destination selects several RREP paths. The node on the RREP paths sends its collected information to the source node. Based on such information, the source constructs a subgraph, finds the LCP to the destination and calculates the VCG payments. Simulation results show that LOTER provides better performance than LSTOP (Wang and Singhal, 2006), LOTTO (Wang and Singhal, 2007) and ad hoc-VCG (Anderegg and Eidenbenz, 2003). Furthermore, we evaluate the successful route discovery ratios of LOTER as well as the other three protocols in the simulation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce the successful route discovery ratio in selfish wireless mobile ad hoc networks and evaluate this ratio by means of simulation.