In multi-hop wireless networks, the mobile nodes usually act as routers to relay
packets generated from other nodes. However, selfish nodes do not cooperate but make use
of the honest ones to relay their packets, which has negative effect on fairness, security, and
performance of the network. In this paper, we propose a novel incentive mechanism to
stimulate cooperation in multi-hop wireless networks. Fairness can be achieved by using
credits to reward the cooperative nodes. The overhead can be significantly reduced by