An Incentive-Based Reputation Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, nodes communicate with others usually using intermediate nodes as relays; and they are expected to cooperate to make the networks reliably. In this thesis, we propose an incentive-based reputation mechanism to motivate the selfish nodes to cooperate in packet forwarding, and apply a simple reputation scheme to encourage the trustworthy behaviors; this mechanism is fully self-organized and the reward of each node is determined from a game theoretical viewpoint. We also take the cooperating probability of each node in the network into account, and prove that cooperating is the optimal strategy for each node in our system. The results of performance evaluation show that the selfish nodes can forward other´s message and cooperate with each other in the general situations.