Trading Performance and Cooperation Incentives in User-Centric Networks

User-centric wireless networks are based on individuals' motivations to share the limited resources of their mobile devices in order to achieve a community-scale goal. Cooperation incentives play a key role in this context to motivate pro-social decisions and to isolate selfish nodes and cheating users. Among them, trust-based and price-based cooperation incentives can be effectively combined to induce collaborative behaviors in Wi-Fi communities. Both incentive mechanisms, however, might hinder the normal operation of the network, thus ultimately impairing performance. This can be due both to the communication overhead of trust management and payment systems, and to the interference between individual motivations and resource management strategies. In this work, we study such a tradeoff between cooperation incentives and performance, with the support of formal verification based on stochastic model checking.