In this article, we propose an incentive-based resource allocation scheme for wireless relay networks. The aim of this article is to construct efficient multicast routes that serve as many users as possible with a given resource budget. First, we introduce a new resource allocation problem called Multi-Hop Multicast Maximization (MHMM). Then, we present our heuristic Incentive-Based Route Construction (IBRC) scheme, which enables each node to construct an efficient allocation separately and selfishly. We prove that the MHMM problem is NP-complete, and demonstrate that IBRC has polynomial-time complexity. Moreover, under the scheme, each node has an incentive to operate as designed. IBRC's signaling overhead is much lower than that of the conventional centralized approach, and the results of simulations demonstrate that IBRC can motivate relay nodes to provide efficient and stable resource allocations. The results also show that the revenue distribution among nodes is reasonable because it reflects the utility provided by each node. Multicast services deployed under IBRC are efficient and achieve a good performance, but only incur a low overhead.
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