A Resilient and Energy-saving Incentive System for Resource Sharing in MANETs

Despite of all progress in terms of computational power, communication bandwidth, and feature richness, limited battery capacity is the major bottleneck for using the resources of mobile devices in innovative distributed applications. Incentives are required for motivating a user to spend energy on behalf of other users and it must be ensured that providing these incentives neither consumes much energy by itself nor allows for free-riding and other types of fraud. In this paper, we present a novel incentive system that is tailored to the application scenario of energyaware resource-sharing between mobile devices. The system has low energy consumption due to avoiding the use of public key cryptography. It uses a virtual currency with reusable coins and detects forgery and other fraud when cashing coins at an off-line broker. A prototype-based measurement study indicates the energy-efficiency of the system, while simulation studies show its resilience to fraud. Even in scenarios with 75% of fraudulent users that are colluding to disguise their fraud only 3.2% of them get away with it while the energy overhead (about 3%) for the incentive system is still moderate