A novel reputation system facilitating cooperation in pervasive wireless environment

The pervasive wireless environment is a novel wireless application environment integrating and interleaving a multiform wireless network. It uses multifunctional nodes as proxies to forward data packets of other nodes. Other nodes can open the door to gain resources and services of other networks by proxy nodes. But these multifunctional nodes do not have the motivation to act as proxy to other nodes. An incentive mechanism should be applied to the pervasive wireless environment to solve the above problem. This paper constructs a novel reputation system to stimulate node cooperation. The reputation system depends on some special nodes to collect, compute and distribute reputation information. These special nodes not only can passively monitor relative nodes but also may actively probe a peculiar node or link. By partial function centralization, this reputation system has lower overhead and higher efficiency than traditional schemes.