An incentive-based system for information providers over peer-to-peer mobile ad-hoc networks

An architecture for a peer-to-peer mobile ad-hoc network offering distributed information provision is presented. Any user can volunteer to become an information server (a server-user). Volunteering implies devoting some of the user's computational resources (storage, bandwidth, processing power) to serving information. An incentive scheme is proposed to encourage end-users to become server-users. The latter are rewarded proportionally to the number of end-user queries served. The proposed architecture is specified as a protocol suite taking security and privacy aspects into account. Details are given on an implementation completed on a WiFi ad-hoc network for the specific case of a distributed tourist information service.