Cheating Detection for Payment Based Incentives with Application to Network Coding
Haifan Yao and Sheng Zhong
Economic incentives are crucial problems in wireless networks, because communication resources are limited and a selfish or economically rational user may let its wireless device deviate from the communication protocol in order to benefit itself. Payment based schemes may serve to fight against such selfish behaviors in data transmissions. However, nodes in charge of payment calculation may also be selfish or corrupted, which can lead to serious problems especially when there is no authority entity available for real time payment inspection. In this paper, we present a general payee initiated threshold scheme to detect miscalculated payments based on threshold cryptography. The scheme guarantees that as long as the number of cheating nodes stays below a certain value, any cheating behavior will definitely be detected and punished. Simulation results show that our scheme is efficient and reliable.
Keywords: Threshold scheme, selfish behavior, payment based incentives