An Incentive Scheme for Packet Forwarding and Payment Reduction in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks Using XOR Network Coding

In wireless ad-hoc networks using XOR network coding, intermediate nodes are required to XOR packets whenever possible. Although there are lots of existing incentive compatible schemes aiming to provide incentives for intermediate nodes to forward packets, they are not suitable for XOR network coding. In this paper, we first present a basic payment scheme to provide incentives to intermediate nodes to follow XOR network coding protocol. We prove that, under our scheme each intermediate node has incentives to follow the XOR protocol. Then we consider the overpayment in the basic scheme, and propose an enhanced payment scheme using SVM model to reduce the payment to a reasonable level. The results show that under the enhanced scheme, the payments can be reduced by up to 70%, and these payment are close to the real forwarding costs.