DSC: Cooperation Incentive Mechanism for Multi-Hop Cellular Networks

Muli-hop cellular network is a promising network architecture which incorporates the ad hoc characteristic into the cellular system aiming to improve current cellular network performance. Unlike single hop cellular network, due to involving autonomous devices in packet forwarding, routing process suffers from new security challenges which endanger the practical implementation of the network. One security challenge is that selfish devices do not relay other nodes´ packets because cooperation consumes their resources and does not provide any immediate advantages. Selfish nodes degrade the network throughput, connectivity and power consumption. In order to stimulate the nodes´ cooperation, we propose a micro-payment mechanism to reward the forwarding nodes and charge the communicating ones. The security analysis shows that the proposed mechanism is robust against rational attacks, and it can thwart some irrational ones. To evaluate the cost of applying our mechanism, an implementation model is proposed. The performance analysis based on the implementation model demonstrates that the overhead is acceptable.