Comparison of Incentive-Based Cooperation Strategies for Hybrid 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 can not react appropriate to dynamic changes of the demand. With multi-hop cellular networks the coverage area can be increased and the installation costs and investment risks for the provider can be reduced. However, the individual customers play an important role in such networks and their participation must be encouraged. 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 as well as goodput, overhead and packet error rate.