Handling Selfishness in Replica Allocation over a Mobile Ad Hoc Network

In a mobile ad hoc network, the mobility and resource constraints of mobile nodes may lead to network partitioning or performance degradation. Several data replication techniques have been proposed to minimize performance degradation. Most of them assume that all mobile nodes collaborate fully in terms of sharing their memory space. In reality, however, some nodes may selfishly decide only to cooperate partially, or not at all, with other nodes. These selfish nodes could then reduce the overall data accessibility in the network. In this paper, we examine the impact of selfish nodes in a mobile ad hoc network from the perspective of replica allocation. We term this selfish replica allocation. In particular, we develop a selfish node detection algorithm that considers partial selfishness and novel replica allocation techniques to properly cope with selfish replica allocation. The conducted simulations demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms traditional cooperative replica allocation techniques in terms of data accessibility, communication cost, and average query delay.