2011
Exploiting Trust Relations for Nash Equilibrium Efficiency in Ad Hoc Networks
S. Zheng, T. Jiang and J. S. Baras
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2011), pp.1-5, Kyoto, Japan, June 5-9, 2011.
Abstract
Ad hoc networks rely on the mutual cooperation
among individual nodes to achieve network-wide objectives. However,
individual nodes may behave selfishly in order to maximize
their own benefits without considering the global benefits of
the network. One approach to incentivize nodes cooperation
for better global benefits is to establish trust relations among
nodes to guide their decision making. In this paper, we present a
game theoretic analysis for the efficiency of establishing trust for
improving node cooperation. The trust relations among nodes are
modeled as a trust-weighted network, and we study a graphical
game in this network where the nodes’ payoffs are affected by
their trust relations. We characterize the Nash equilibrium and
the social optimum of this game and show that the game efficiency
has a close relationship to the Bonacich centralities of nodes in
the trust-weighted network. Furthermore, we propose to improve
game efficiency by introducing heterogeneous resources to nodes
according to their centralities. We provide both experimental and
theoretical analysis on the improvement of the game efficiency.