Efficient Self-Organization in Multihop Wireless LAN

Efficient cooperation and self-organization is a fundamental challenge in distributed autonomous systems. In this paper, we study this problem in the context of multi-hop extended wireless LANs, in which a mobile user can reach the access point (AP) over a multi-hop relaying path through intermediate nodes. While both users and service providers can enjoy the benefits of such extended network coverage, the system must provide incentives for a selfish user to contribute its resources (battery, bandwidth, CPU, etc.) to forward packets for others. Moreover, the system efficiency depends largely on how the relaying paths are formed, which ultimately depends on the incentive mechanism in use. Our goal is to design an incentive framework that not only stimulates the selfish users to participate in packet forwarding but also leads to desirable system-wide performance in various scenarios. This is achieved by enforcing both rewards (in cases of successful forwarding) and penalties (in cases of packet losses) in the incentive model. We describe our incentive framework design and analytically study the overall system efficiency in both heavily loaded and lightly loaded cases. We further demonstrate the performance gain of our incentive model, as compared to a fixed-price packet purse model, through extensive simulations.