Design of an Optimal Bayesian Incentive Compatible Broadcast Protocol for Ad hoc Networks with Rational Nodes

TL;DR

This paper introduces BIC-B, a Bayesian incentive compatible broadcast protocol for ad hoc networks that reduces incentive costs and ensures rational node participation, outperforming existing dominant strategy approaches.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Bayesian incentive compatible broadcast protocol that minimizes incentive budgets and guarantees budget balance and individual rationality in ad hoc networks.

Findings

BIC-B reduces incentive budgets compared to previous protocols.

The protocol satisfies Bayesian incentive compatibility and budget balance.

It outperforms dominant strategy incentive compatible protocols.

Abstract

Nodes in an ad hoc wireless network incur certain costs for forwarding packets since packet forwarding consumes the resources of the nodes. If the nodes are rational, free packet forwarding by the nodes cannot be taken for granted and incentive based protocols are required to stimulate cooperation among the nodes. Existing incentive based approaches are based on the VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves) mechanism which leads to high levels of incentive budgets and restricted applicability to only certain topologies of networks. Moreover, the existing approaches have only focused on unicast and multicast. Motivated by this, we propose an incentive based broadcast protocol that satisfies Bayesian incentive compatibility and minimizes the incentive budgets required by the individual nodes. The proposed protocol, which we call {\em BIC-B} (Bayesian incentive compatible broadcast) protocol, also satisfies budget balance. We also derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the ex-post individual rationality of the BIC-B protocol. The {\em BIC-B} protocol exhibits superior performance in comparison to a dominant strategy incentive compatible broadcast protocol.