Microsoft Word - FESCIM

In multi-hop cellular networks, the mobile nodes usually relay others’ packets for enhancing the network performance and deployment. However, selfish nodes usually do not cooperate but make use of the cooperative nodes to relay their packets, which has a negative effect on the network fairness and performance. In this paper, we propose a fair and efficient incentive mechanism to stimulate the node cooperation. Our mechanism applies a fair charging policy by charging the source and destination nodes when both of them benefit from the communication. To implement this charging policy efficiently, hashing operations are used in the ACK packets to reduce the number of digital-signature operations. Moreover, reducing the overhead of the payment cheques is essential for the efficient implementation of the incentive mechanism due to the large number of payment transactions. Instead of generating a cheque per message, a small-size cheque can be generated per route, and a cheque submission scheme is proposed to reduce the number of submitted cheques and protect against collusion attacks. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate that our mechanism can secure the payment and significantly reduce the cheques’ overhead, and the fair charging policy can be implemented almost computationally free by using hashing operations.