Enforcing Collaboration in MANET Routing Protocols

The possibility to create a wireless network through portable devices (or nodes) is getting more and more common. A community of users who use a Smartphone or a PDA can quickly establish a net everywhere. Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) are nets without a fixed infrastructure and the routing of information is left to participants. In a MANET, each device may take any type of behaviuor, but collaboration - seen as forwading of information of other nodes - is a fundamental feature since a misdeed causes an unreliable net. One possible reason why a node may stop collaborating is to save its energy, which is a limited resource for it. We propose a modification of the DSR protocol to promote collaboration between devices. Its main idea is that nodes are induced to take a fair play in order to obtain a good or optimal Quality of Service (QoS), while devices that tend to fail to collaborate will only get a low-quality service. Moreover, we show, through charts, the results obtained considering nodes with different reputation and, especially, we focus our attention to devices with a bad reputation.