Effect of Selfish Behavior on Network Performance in VANET

A multi hop vehicular ad hoc network is a peer to peer network of wireless nodes where nodes are required to perform routing activity to provide end to end connectivity among nodes. As vehicles are constrained by bandwidth, some vehicles may behave selfishly and deny forwarding packets for other nodes, even though they expect other nodes to forward packets to keep network connected. We simulate forwarding node selfish behavior on top of ad hoc on demand distance vector routing protocol (AODV). In forwarding node selfish behavior, selfish nodes do not forward data or control packets (routing packets) for other nodes. We show that selfish behavior reduces routing overhead of network which intern decrease collision and increase throughput of dense network. Secondly, with our simulation study we find that in dense vehicular ad hoc networks where route breakages are frequent, routing control packets consume significant fraction of network bandwidth (also refer as broadcast storm problem) and selfish behavior by certain number of vehicles reduce the overall routing overhead in network which in turn result in increment of network throughput.