FESCIM: Fair, Efficient, and Secure Cooperation Incentive Mechanism for Multihop Cellular Networks

In multihop cellular networks, the mobile nodes usually relay others’ packets for enhancing the network performance and deployment. However, selfish nodes usually do not cooperate but make use of the cooperative nodes to relay their packets, which has a negative effect on the network fairness and performance. In this paper, we propose a fair and efficient incentive mechanism to stimulate the node cooperation. Our mechanism applies a fair charging policy by charging the source and destination nodes when both of them benefit from the communication. To implement this charging policy efficiently, hashing operations are used in the ACK packets to reduce the number of public-key-cryptography operations. Moreover, reducing the overhead of the payment checks is essential for the efficient implementation of the incentive mechanism due to the large number of payment transactions. Instead of generating a check per message, a small-size check can be generated per route, and a check submission scheme is proposed to reduce the number of submitted checks and protect against collusion attacks. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate that our mechanism can secure the payment and significantly reduce the checks’ overhead, and the fair charging policy can be implemented almost computationally free by using hashing operations