A quality of relay-based incentive pricing scheme for relaying services in multi-hop cellular networks

Abstract

Cooperation among nodes is a critical prerequisite for the success of the relaying ad-hoe networks. Providing incentives for mobile nodes to forward data packets for others has received increasing attention. In this paper, we propose a Quality of Relay (QoR)-based pricing scheme to determine the price of the feedback incentives for intermediate nodes based on the individual importance of each mobile node contributing to successful hop-by-hop connections. Simulation results indicate that the QoR-based pricing scheme results in higher service availability than the fixed-rate pricing scheme under different relationships between price of feedback and willingness of forwarding packets. Moreover, the proposed pricing scheme shifts incentives from the nodes of low importance to the nodes of high importance in the networks so that it enhances service availability with only a slight increase in relaying costs.