Modelling incentives and protocols for collaboration in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are self-configuring networks of mobile nodes, connected by wireless links. If a destination node is beyond the transmission range of an origin node, then the nodes must cooperate to provide a multi-hop route. Any node can act as a sender, receiver or transit node. It is in a node's interest to be a sender or receiver, but it is less clear what the value is of forwarding traffic on behalf of other nodes. The nodes should therefore be given incentives to act as transit nodes, because otherwise the network would fail to function. A way to do so is by introducing for each node a credit balance, where nodes use credits to pay for the costs of sending their own traffic, and earn credits by forwarding traffic from other nodes.The incentive scheme requires that the information needed to compute the credit balance at each node must be locally available at the node. In this paper we present a model of a signalling protocol that obtains and distributes the prices that the nodes charge for processing flows so that the credit balances can be locally computed at each node. Simulation experiments show that the protocol can efficiently gather and distribute the control information such that effective flow allocation takes place for reasonable values of the signalling rate and signal processing delays.

Directory-based incentive management services for ad-hoc mobile clouds

“…Compared with the traditional public CSP, the billing/incentive mechanism for a mobile device in a mobile ad-hoc cloud is more difficult because of the decentralized nature of administration and working. Considerable works on the incentive mechanism for mobile ad-hoc networks, such as (Crowcroft, Gibbens, Kelly, & Ostring, 2004;Gobel & Krzesinski, 2008;Z. Li & Shen, 2012;Lu, Lin, Zhu, Shen, & Preiss, 2010), have been conducted.…”

“…However, a subtle difference exists between a mobile ad-hoc cloud and a mobile ad-hoc network, i.e., an ad-hoc network normally shares network resources to relay network traffic in relevant situations, whereas a mobile ad-hoc cloud shares computational resources to save energy and, in some cases, to improve response time. Consequently, the incentives schemes (Crowcroft et al, 2004;Gobel & Krzesinski, 2008;Z. Li & Shen, 2012;Lu et al, 2010) for ad-hoc networks are unsuitable for ad-hoc clouds.…”

Incentive-based control of ad hoc networks: A performance study

“…A protocol to implement the incentive-based control was presented in [13]. In this regard we observe that the parameter values required for the calculation of Eqns.…”