Punishment in Selfish Wireless Networks: A Game Theoretic Analysis

In currently deployed wireless networks, rational participants have no incentive to cooperatively forward traffic for others. Though much work has focused on providing such incentives, few have done so with adequate focus on the ease of deployment; often, these systems require trusted third parties or tamper-proof hardware. In this paper, the authors use game theory to analyze two internal incentive mechanisms, which rely only on the primitives made available by standard 802.11 hardware.