Comparison of motivation-based cooperation mechanisms for hybrid wireless networks

Today's public Wireless LANs are restricted to hotspots. With the current technology, providers can only target a small audience and in turn charge high prices for their service to generate revenue. Also, providers cannot react appropriately to dynamic changes in the demand. With multi-hop cellular networks the coverage area can be increased and the installation costs as well as investment risks for the provider can be reduced. However, the individual customers play an important role in such networks and their participation must be ensured. Therefore, we propose a cooperation and accounting scheme which introduces monetary rewards. We compare our scheme called CASHnet with the Nuglet scheme using simulations under the criteria of network liveliness, goodput, overhead, and packet drop reasons as well as cash flow.