Optimizations for Charged Service Provision in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Optimized service provisioning is a challenging problem in dynamic environments such as Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANETs). Most of the existing approaches assume an environment, where service provision is free (and dictated) and servers do not have an incentive to maximize their benefit. In this paper, the authors consider the nodes in MANETs to be independent, rational agents trying to maximize their profits through service provision. They model this problem as a Generalized Assignment Problem (GAP). They adopt a pay-as-you-go model and introduce into the proposed profit maximization algorithm expected payoffs based on estimates of server-to-client connectivity. They define connectivity as the lifetime of the network connection between a client and a server.