Truthful Multicast in Selfish Wireless Networks

In wireless networks, it is often assumed that each individual wireless terminal will faithfully follow the prescribed protocols without any deviation– except, perhaps, for a few faulty or malicious ones. Wireless terminals, when owned by individual users, will likely do what is the most beneficial to their owners, i.e., act “selfishly”. Therefore, an algorithm or protocol intended for selfish wireless networks must be designed. In this paper, we specifically study how to conduct efficient multicast routing in selfish wireless networks. We assume that each wireless terminal or communication link will incur a cost when it transits some data. Traditionally, the VCG mechanism has been the only method to design protocols so that each selfish agent will follow the protocols for its own interest to maximize its benefit. The main contributions of this paper are two-folds. First, for each of the widely used multicast structures, we show that the VCG based mechanism does not guarantee that the selfish terminals will follow the protocol. Second, we design the first multicast protocols without using VCG mechanism such that each agent maximizes its profit when it truthfully reports its cost. Extensive simulations are conducted to study the practical performances of the proposed protocols regarding the actual network cost and total payment.