Game theory for cooperative and relay communications in mobile ad hoc networks: a brief tutorial

In mobile ad hoc networks such as wireless ad hoc networks and sensor networks, most of the functions (routing, mobility management and security) must rely on cooperation between nodes. Every node in these networks is both end host (it generates its own data and routing traffic) and infrastructure (it forwards traffic for others), but rational nodes have no incentive to cooperatively forward traffic for others, since this kind of forwarding is not costless. Thus, we are motivated to use game theory to analyse cooperative mechanisms, and derive incentive strategies enforcing cooperation in forwarding. Unlike traditional approaches, in this paper, we introduce a novel and interdisciplinary simulation-based analysis scheme to the networking community in game-theoretic settings. Moreover, we investigate noise models and show some counterintuitive simulation results in presence of noise.