EXPLOITING MOBILITY IN AD-HOC WIRELESS NETWORKS WITH INCENTIVES

Incentive mechanisms can promote cooperative behavior in the network.But an important factor has been consistently neglected from such "mobility".By allowing nodes to move strategically in the network,the dynamics generated by an incentive mechanism can change significantly.In this paper,we consider node position as the strategy of a user that participates in an ad-hoc network where an incentive mechanism is strictly enforced.Using game theoretic models,we perform a qualitative study of the effect of different incentive mechanisms and show that if users are allowed to strategically choose their positions in the system,network performance degrades significantly.Otherwise,our results indicate that the best strategies for the users lead to topologies where the nodes are either tightly clustered together or spread into a chain.