Verifiable Credit Based Transfers in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Encouraging cooperation between users of mobile devices operating in ad hoc mode is a difficult task mostly because the scarce battery and bandwidth resources of devices suggest that selfish behavior may be most beneficial. The insecure usage of credits to reward cooperation can easily provide an incentive for cheating, thus, on the long term only leading to selfishness. In this paper we propose several secure credit based mechanisms enforcing fairness in a hybrid wireless content retrieval system operating both in cellular and ad hoc connectivity modes. Our solution consists of mechanisms for securely and privately discovering desired content on neighboring devices, simultaneously exchanging credit and content shares in a verifiable manner and for generating and expiring non-forgeable credits. We present experimental results of a partial prototype of our system implemented on MPx and E680i cellular phones and HP iPaq hx4700 PDAs, along with extensive simulation results showing that our solution significantly reduces the effectiveness of selfish behavior, making it an unattractive strategy.