A Truthful Optimal Path Auction for DSA Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of incentive based routing in DSA networks, where each secondary node having a certain capacity incurs a cost for routing traffic through it. We propose a path auction scheme in which each secondary node announces its cost and capacity to the routing mechanism, both of which are considered as private information known only to the node. We design a route selection mechanism and a pricing function that can induce nodes to reveal their cost and capacity honestly, while minimizing the payment that needs to be given to the nodes. Earlier works either do not consider the capacity constraint of the nodes (VCG based least cost path routing [4], [6], [10]), or consider the capacity constraint without enforcing truthful capacity reporting [8], or require special hardware/software to be installed in the nodes for truthful revelation of a node’s private information [11]. Moreover, the VCG based mechanisms focus on finding a least cost path, which may not be the path that requires the least payment. For deploying our path auction based routing mechanism in DSA networks, we provide a polynomial time algorithm to find the optimal route over which traffic should be routed and to compute the payment that each node should receive. The performance of our scheme is evaluated via extensive simulations.