SIP: A secure incentive protocol against selfishness in mobile ad hoc networks

Security in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) has received intensive attention recently, whereas the issue of selfish nodes, which may refuse to forward packets for others to save their own resources, is not well addressed yet. This kind of noncooperative action would cause a severe problem that is more likely in MANETs compared to their wired counterpart. To cope with this problem, we propose SIP: a Secure Incentive Protocol to stimulate cooperation among those possible selfish nodes. The most attractive feature of SIP is that it does not rely on any pre-deployed infrastructure and provides highly secure incentives for selfish nodes to be cooperative in packet forwarding with low overhead and implementation complexity.