Secure incentive mechanism for multihop wireless networks

In multi hop wireless networks, the mobile nodes perform routing to relay the packets of other nodes. But selfish nodes do not relay other nodes´ packets to save their limited resources. It greatly affect the network throughput and performance. Credits are used to stimulate the selfish nodes´ cooperation in incentive protocols. But the existing protocols use heavyweight public-key cryptographic operations for securing the payment. In this paper, we propose secure incentive mechanism that uses the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and the hashing operations, so as to improve the network performance and throughput. The proposed technique reduces the overhead of the system which is less than that of the public-key based protocols.