Engineering Incentive Schemes for Ad Hoc Networks

In ad hoc networks, devices have to cooperate in order to compensate for the absence of infrastructure. Yet, autonomous devices tend to abstain from cooperation in order to save their own resources. Incentive schemes have been proposed as a means of fostering cooperation under these circumstances. In order to work effectively, incentive schemes need to be carefully tailored to the characteristics of the cooperation protocol they should support. This is a complex and demanding task. However, up to now, engineers are given virtually no help in designing an incentive scheme. Even worse, there exists no systematic investigation into which characteristics should be taken into account and what they imply. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a systematic approach for the engineering of incentive schemes. The suggested procedure comprises the analysis and adjustment of the cooperation protocol, the choice of appropriate incentives for cooperation, and guidelines for the evaluation of the inc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: EDBTW
• Authors: Philipp Obreiter, Birgitta König-Ries, Georgios Papadopoulos 0002
• Keywords: Ad Hoc Networks, Cooperation Protocol, EDBTW 2004, Incentive Scheme, Software Engineering