Achieving fair cooperation for multi-hop ad hoc networks

In multi-hop ad hoc networks there is no central authority or dedicated infrastructure for managing the network. Nodes have to cooperate with each other in order to keep the network working. However, conflict of interests and limited resources of the nodes encourage selfishness among them. In recent years several approaches have been proposed to address the problem of cooperation in multi-hop networks and most of them seek full cooperation. In this paper we argue that achieving full cooperation is not realistic in general. We propose a novel framework that uses the notion of fairness for enforcing cooperation among nodes. Then we provide a distributed algorithm that optimizes network utility under fairness constraints.