Cooperation in wireless multihop networks remains a significant research problem to be addressed as a node's selfishness can cause communication failure. Incentive mechanisms in the form of reputation or credit rewards have been proposed to stimulate nodes to cooperate. Complementing each other, a hybrid of the two types of schemes has been proposed to improve efficiency in mitigating selfishness, at the cost of high communication overhead. This paper proposes an alternative to reputation level incentive named Recharge-As-Reward (RAR) mechanism, as an explicit reward to strengthen motivation for nodes to cooperate. RAR is also combined with a Credit-As-Reward (CAR) mechanism that is based on centralized credit-based architecture, which makes our scheme a hybrid incentive mechanism. Through a comparison with another hybrid scheme, we show that RAR/CAR is able to increase nodes' forwarding rates while reducing message/communication overhead by being less reliant on a central agent.
['Normalia Samian', 'Winston Seah', 'Zuriati Ahmad Zukarnain', 'Azizol Abdullah', 'Zurina Mohd Hanapi']
Recharge-as-Reward Mechanism to Incentivize Cooperative Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks