A dynamic pricing approach for self-organized mobile ad hoc networks

In self-organized mobile ad hoe networks (MANET) where each user is its own authority, fully cooperative behaviors, such as unconditionally forwarding packets for each other, cannot be directly assumed. The pricing mechanism is one way to provide incentives for the users to act cooperatively by rewarding some payment for cooperative behaviors. In this paper, we model the pricing and routing in self-organized MANETs as multi-stage dynamic games. A dynamic pricing framework is proposed to maximize the sender/receiver's payoff by considering the dynamic nature of MANETs, meanwhile, keeping the forwarding incentives of the relay nodes by providing the optimal payments based on the auction rules. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed dynamic pricing schemes have significant performance gains over the existing static pricing algorithms.