A Coalitional Game Model for Heat Diffusion Based Incentive Routing and Forwarding Scheme

We propose an incentive routing and forwarding scheme that integrates a reputation system into a monetary payment mechanism to encourage nodes cooperation in wireless ad hoc networks. For the first time in the literature, we build our reputation system based on a heat diffusion model. The heat diffusion model provides us a way of combining the direct and indirect reputation together and propagating the reputation from locally to globally. Further, we model and analyze our incentive scheme using a coalitional game, which is not the usual non-cooperative game like others. We further prove that under a proper condition this game has a non-empty stable core. From the evaluation we can see that the cumulative utility of nodes increases when nodes stay in the core.