An untraceable coin-based incentive scheme for multi-hop networks

Encouraging cooperation in self-organizing ad hoc networks has been an important task in the last few years. The main focus of previous work is on providing protocols, which encourage packet forwarding in multi-hop networks in absence of a managed infrastructure. Protocols proposed to date, however, do not consider any aspects of anonymity. Instead, the identities of the communication entities as well as the route including the identities of the intermediate nodes are revealed. In this paper, we propose a protocol that provides an efficient incentive mechanism for forwarding packets while keeping the identities of the participating entities private and untraceable.