Stimulating Cooperation in Route Discovery of Ad Hoc Networks

In autonomous ad hoc network, nodes belonging to different entities try to maximize their own utilities. Selfish dropping of route control packets relieves node of relaying packets for others and saves its own resources. Current watchdog or ACK-based detection scheme cannot cope with it, effectively. Based on statistics relation of route control packets within neighborhood, this paper proposed an energy-efficient distributed algorithm to detect the selfishness in route discovery. Relation between key parameter setting, algorithm's effectiveness and performance was analyzed with tool of game theory. Extensive simulations showed that the algorithm could detect and punish the selfish nodes effectively.