Stimulating Cooperation in Multi-hop Wireless Networks Using Cheating Detection System

In multi-hop wireless networks, the mobile nodes usually act as routers to relay packets generated from other nodes. However, selfish nodes do not cooperate but make use of the honest ones to relay their packets, which has negative effect on fairness, security, and performance of the network. In this paper, we propose a novel incentive mechanism to stimulate cooperation in multi-hop wireless networks. Fairness can be achieved by using credits to reward the cooperative nodes. The overhead can be significantly reduced by using a cheating detection system (CDS) to secure the payment. Extensive security analysis demonstrates that the CDS can identify the cheating nodes effectively under different cheating strategies. Simulation results show that the overhead of the proposed incentive mechanism is incomparable with the existing ones.