Provisioning Protected Resource Sharing in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

We propose a protection framework for resource sharing to promote cooperation among nodes in multi-hop wireless networks. In the resource sharing protocol, a node claims credits when it relays others’ packets. A node also issues rewards to the node which relays its packets. Rewards are used to validate the correctness of credits. In order to protect credits and rewards, we devise a secure registry scheme that supports the timed test of credit validation, and then prove that the scheme is not susceptible to various security attacks. Without any trusted authority in the operation of the framework, we make cryptographic definitions for the scheme, construct a provably secure registry scheme, and implement the timed test of credit validation with one-way chains. Finally, simulation results observed in J-Sim simulator corroborate that resource sharing is correctly supported and that credits and rewards are secured from selfish behaviors.