Copyright © 2012 Ming-Hua Lin and Hao-Jan Hsu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper investigates an incentive pricing problem for relaying services in multihop cellular networks. Providing incentives to encourage mobile nodes to relay data is a critical factor in building successful multihop cellular networks. Most existing approaches adopt fixed-rate or location-based pricing on rewarding packets forwarding. This study applies a mathematical programming model to determine an optimal incentive price for each intermediate node that provides relaying services. Under the obtained incentive price, the connection availability of the networks is maximized by using the same relaying costs as other pricing schemes. A signomial geometric programming problem is constructed, and a deterministic optimization approach is employed to solve the problem. Besides, quality-of-service constraints are added in the proposed model to mitigate the unfairness between connection availabilities of individual nodes. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed model obtains the optimal incentive price on relaying services to maximize connection availability of the networks.