A novel hybrid incentive mechanism for node cooperation in mobile cyber-physical systems

Abstract

The high quality of information transmission in mobile cyber-physical systems mainly relies on the assumption that nodes are willing to participate in the forwarding service. As a result, uncooperative behaviours of selfish nodes may degrade network performance greatly. The existing incentive mechanisms cannot find the balance between detecting selfish behaviours and providing cooperation motivations. In this study, we present a novel hybrid incentive mechanism with reputation-formed payment risk, called reputation-based credit mechanism (RCM). Combined with a forwarding cost model, neighbouring nodes achieve a Nash equilibrium in the non-cooperation game, which economically provides a rational decision on the allocation of forwarding tasks for transmitters under an optimal reward. The intermediate nodes also acquire their maximal gains. We evaluate the performance of RCM on GloMoSim. Through enough comparison with existing solutions, we found that when the percentage of selfish nodes is not above 60, RCM can improve the network performance while the necessary payment is lower.