A taxonomy of incentive patterns - the design space of incentives for cooperation

In ad hoc networks, devices must cooperate in order to
compensate for the absence of infrastructure. Yet, autonomous
devices are free to decide whether to cooperate or not. Hence,
incentives are indispensable to induce cooperation between
autonomous devices. Recently, several approaches have been
suggested that stimulate cooperation among devices. In this
report, we point out that these approaches fall short of
exploiting the design space of incentives for cooperation.
Therefore, we introduce incentive patterns as a means of
systematically conceiving incentive schemes with respect to
the specifics of the application environment. Based on
economics, we derive several incentive patterns and discuss them
with respect to a set of general characteristics. Consequently,
we propose a taxonomy that classifies the derived incentive
patterns. Lastly, we exemplify systematic design of incentive
schemes in the context of our DIANE project.