Cooperation and accounting strategy for multi-hop cellular networks

Multi-hop cellular networks (also called hybrid networks) appears to be a promising combination of the dynamics of mobile ad hoc networks and the reliability of infrastructured wireless networks. However, several known weaknesses of mobile ad hoc networks still persist. Besides the security and routing issues, the cooperation among nodes is of great importance. We propose a highly decentralized accounting and security architecture that provides a solid foundation for a cooperation scheme based on rewards and is applicable to multi-hop cellular networks. This scheme incorporates a security architecture which is based on public key cryptography and uses digital-signatures and certificates.