A Charging and Rewarding Scheme for Packet Forwarding

In multi-hop cellular networks, data packets have to be relayed hop by hop from a given mobile station to a base station and vice-versa. This means that the mobile stations must accept to forward information for the benefit of other stations. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism that is based on a charging/rewarding scheme and that makes collaboration rational for selfish nodes. We base our solution on symmetric cryptography to cope with the limited resources of the mobile stations. We provide a set of protocols and study their robustness with respect to various attacks. By leveraging on the relative stability of the routes, our solution leads to a very moderate overhead.