In many applications, wireless ad-hoc networks are formed by devices belonging to independent users. Therefore, a challenging problem is how to provide incentives to stimulate cooperation. In this paper, we study ad-hoc games-the routing and packet forwarding games in wireless ad-hoc networks. Unlike previous work which focuses either on routing or on forwarding, this paper investigates both routing and forwarding. We first uncover an impossibility result-there does not exist a protocol such that following the protocol to always forward others' traffic is a dominant action. Then we define a novel solution concept called cooperation-optimal protocols. We present Corsac, a cooperation-optimal protocol which consists of a routing protocol and a forwarding protocol. The routing protocol of Corsac integrates VCG with a novel cryptographic technique to address the challenge in wireless ad-hoc networks that a link's cost (i.e., its type) is determined by two nodes together. Corsac also applies efficient cryptographic techniques to design a forwarding protocol to enforce the routing decision, such that fulfilling the routing decision is the optimal action of each node in the sense that it brings the maximum utility to the node. We evaluate our protocols using simulations. Our evaluations demonstrate that our protocols provide incentives for nodes to forward packets. Additionally, we discuss the challenging issues in designing incentive-compatible protocols in ad hoc networks.

User-contributed wireless mesh networks are a disruptive technology that may fundamentally change the economics of edge network access and bring the benefits of a computer network infrastructure to local communities at low cost, anywhere in the world. To achieve high throughput despite highly unpredictable and lossy wireless channels, it is essential that such networks take advantage of transmission opportunities wherever they emerge. However, as opportunistic routing departs from the traditional but less effective deterministic, shortest-path based routing, user nodes in such networks may have less incentive to follow protocols and contribute. In this paper, we present the first routing protocols in which it is incentive-compatible for each user node to honestly participate in the routing despite opportunistic transmissions. We not only rigorously prove the properties of our protocols but also thoroughly evaluate a complete implementation of our protocols. Experiments show that there is a 5.8%-58.0% gain in throughput when compared with an opportunistic routing protocol that does not provide incentives and users can act selfishly.

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Wireless security has been an active research area since the last decade. A lot of studies of wireless security use cryptographic tools, but traditional cryptographic tools are normally based on computational assumptions, which may turn out to be invalid in the future. Consequently, it is very desirable to build cryptographic tools that do not rely on computational assumptions.In this paper, we focus on a crucial cryptographic tool, namely 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer. This tool plays a central role in cryptography because we can build a cryptographic protocol for any polynomial-time computable function using this tool. We present a novel 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer protocol based on wireless channel characteristics, which does not rely on any computational assumption. We also illustrate the potential broad applications of this protocol by giving an application on private communications. We have fully implemented this protocol on wireless devices and conducted experiments in real environments to evaluate the protocol and its application to private communications. Our experimental results demonstrate that it has reasonable efficiency.