Cooperation incentives based load balancing in UCN: A probabilistic approach

User Centric Networks (UCN) empowers the endusers as providers rather than just consumers of the network. Cooperation incentives based on reputation and crediting mechanisms are certain core enabling factors of UCN among which ensuring a certain level of QoS plays a great role for the maintenance of the UCN environment. In this paper we propose a QoS-based crediting mechanism, providing incentives for access points (APs) to share the load, i.e. the clients, in a fair way, thereby ensuring a homogenous level of QoS throughout the UCN community. We discuss a utility-based decision making framework for the incentivized cooperation based load balancing mechanism in UCN environment.