Lightweight privacy-preserving routing and incentive protocol for hybrid ad hoc wireless network

We propose a privacy-preserving routing and incentive protocol, called PRIPO, for hybrid ad hoc wireless network. PRIPO uses micropayment to stimulate node cooperation without submitting payment receipts. The lightweight hashing and symmetric-key-cryptography operations are implemented to preserve the users' privacy. The nodes' pseudonyms are efficiently computed using hashing operations. Only a trusted party can link these pseudonyms to the real identities for charging and rewarding operations. Moreover, PRIPO protects the location privacy of the anonymous source and destination nodes. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate that PRIPO can secure the payment and preserve the users' privacy with acceptable overhead.