  Selfish behaviors are common in self-organized Mobile Ad hoc Networks
(MANETs) where nodes belong to different authorities. Since cooperation of
nodes is essential for routing protocols, various methods have been proposed to
stimulate cooperation among selfish nodes. In order to provide sufficient
incentives, most of these methods pay nodes a premium over their actual costs
of participation. However, they lead to considerably large overpayments.
Moreover, existing methods ignore mobility of nodes, for simplicity. However,
owing to the mobile nature of MANETs, this assumption seems unrealistic. In
this paper, we propose an optimal game theoretical framework to ensure the
proper cooperation in mobility aware routing for MANETs. The proposed method is
based on the multi-dimensional optimal auctions which allows us to consider
path durations, in addition to the route costs. Path duration is a metric that
best reflects changes in topology caused by mobility of nodes and, it is widely
used in mobility aware routing protocols. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism
is optimal in that it minimizes the total expected payments. We provide
theoretical analysis to support our claims. In addition, simulation results
show significant improvements in terms of payments compared to the most popular
existing methods.
