Dynamic reputation-based incentive mechanism considering heterogeneous networks

Selfish behavior by users significantly affects the overall performance and degrades the overall connectivity in heterogeneous networks such as Personal Networks (PNs). Incentives are considered one of the best solutions for this situation. This paper proposes a dynamic reputation-based incentive mechanism for cooperative relay in PNs. Based on reputation calculations for individual contributions of intermediate relay nodes in a cooperative relay service, the proposed scheme dynamically assigns incentives in terms of additional throughput for those cooperative relay nodes. Experimental results of two simulation scenarios show that dynamic incentives are appropriate and sustainable for motivating user participation in PNs, particularly for applications characterized by wide coverage and high data rates.