A novel fair incentive protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

To enhance the overall performance of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), people have tried to solve the issue of node selfishness, which has sparked a surge of research interests in credit based incentive protocols. The core idea of credit based incentive is to provide incentives for selfish nodes to faithfully forward packets in a MANET. Recently, several credit based incentive protocols have been proposed. However, the fairness issue in those reported credit based incentive protocols has never been well addressed yet. Without the fairness guarantees, the whole network still cannot reach its optimum cooperative status. Therefore, in (his paper, aiming at fairness, we first define the fairness principle for credit based incentive protocol, and then present a novel fair incentive protocol (FIP) for MANETs.