Mitigating routing misbehavior in multi-hop networks using evolutionary game theory

Multi-hop wireless networks have been an active research area for decades, however, the solutions proposed to solve routing misbehaviors are still not robust. In this paper, we use the evolutionary game theory (EGT) framework to address one issue of routing misbehavior, the problem of selfishness. We propose the use of distributed algorithms that are able to force selfish nodes to cooperate and forward packets from other nodes, despite their desire to “conserve energy” by not forwarding external packets.