An incentive-based mechanism for fair bidirectional transmissions in wireless mesh networks

The previous studies almost focus on the fairness problem of the uplink traffic in wireless mesh networks. This paper studies the fairness problem for bidirectional traffic in multi-hop wireless mesh networks containing selfish nodes. Unlike the transmission of uplink traffic, where transit packets are dropped at intermediate Transit Access Points (TAPs), almost all downlink traffic is dropped at the gateway. To resolve the problem, this paper presents an incentive-based mechanism (IBM) under which the optimal strategies of selfish TAPs and the gateway are the corresponding actions that enforce fairness. Moreover, this paper formulates the target throughput of each TAP in the network, proves the feasibility of the target throughputs for the uplink and downlink traffic of each TAP, and uses IBM to ensure that all selfish TAPs and the gateway follow the fairness model truthfully. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed mechanisms are accurate and truthful.