Title: Cost Aware Routing as an Incentive Based Game
Authors: Ali Yuksel, Lakshmi Priya Rajagopal and Sirin Tekinay (Poster II, 15)

ABSTRACT

We consider CARA (Cost Aware Routing with Auctions), which was introduced in [1]. CARA uses an auction-based incentive scheme to stimulate intermediate nodes to forward packets at the MAC level in addition to those selected as the forwarding nodes by the arbitrary routing algorithm at the network layer. The bidding scheme at the MAC layer is based on remaining battery power and transmit power level of a node. Results presented in [1] show that a CARA-enabled network, where cost is defined as a function of remaining battery level and transmit energy, provides cost efficiency by reducing the cost of delivering application layer user packets. In this work we study the impact of varying traffic levels generated at each node, while preserving the total traffic generated in the network. We analyze the lifetime of the network, lifetime of the individual nodes, which are now classified into high traffic and low traffic classes. Our preliminary results indicate an improvement in network lifetime compared to the uniform traffic case. Our ongoing research aims at further improvements by incorporating nodal traffic level into the bidding scheme.