Secure Cooperation Incentive Scheme with Limited Use of Public Key Cryptography for Multi-Hop Wireless Network

Secure cooperation incentive schemes usually use public key cryptography, which incur too heavy overhead to be used efficiently in limited-resource nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel incentive scheme that requires public-key operations only for the first packet in a series. The efficient hashing operations are used in the successive packets so that the overhead of the packet series converges to that of the hashing operations. Our evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure and has much less overhead than the public key cryptography based incentive schemes.

1. INTRODUCTION

The interest in multi-hop wireless networks such as mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), multi-hop cellular network (MCN), or vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) has been increasing significantly [1]. In these networks, the traffic originated from a node is relayed through other nodes to the destination for enabling new applications and enhancing the network performance and deployment. However, due to involving autonomous nodes in the packet relay, the routing suffers from security challenges that endanger the practical implementation of these networks.