On Designing Incentive-Compatible Routing and Forwarding Protocols in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we study ad-hoc games -- the routing and packet forwarding games in wireless ad-hoc networks. Unlike previous work which focuses either on routing or on forwarding, this paper investigates both routing and forwarding. We first uncover an impossibility result -- there does not exist a protocol such that following the protocol to always forward others' traffic is a dominant action. Then we define the new solution concept of cooperation-optimal protocols. We present Corsac, a cooperation-optimal protocol consisting of a routing protocol and a forwarding protocol.