Exploiting Trust Relations for Nash Equilibrium Efficiency in Ad Hoc Networks

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.