SMM: A Truthful Mechanism for Maximum Lifetime Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

As an important metric for wireless ad hoc networks, network lifetime has received great attentions in recent years. Existing lifetime-aware algorithms have an implicit assumption that nodes are cooperative and truthful, and they cannot work properly when the network contains selfish nodes. To make these algorithms achieve their design objectives even in the presence of selfish nodes, in this paper, we propose a truthful mechanism Second-Max-Min (SMM) based on the analysis of current algorithms as well as a DSR-like routing protocol for the mechanism implementation. In SMM mechanism, the source node gives appropriate payments to relay nodes, and the payments are related to the path which has the second maximum lifetime in all possible paths. We show that the payment ratio is relatively small due to the nature of lifetime-aware routing algorithms, which is confirmed by experiments.