Evaluating selfishness impact on MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) use many different routing protocols to route data packets between nodes. These routing protocols are designed taking for granted that all nodes are cooperative and willing to forward control and data packets from and to other nodes. However, when selfish nodes exist in the network, the network performance may degrade significantly. In previous research, selfish nodes are predetermined, meaning that a node is either selfish or not from the beginning (i.e., when deployment takes place) and retains that behavior over time. However, in reality selfishness is not static, but an outcome of restricted energy. In this paper, we investigate the operation of Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol, as selfish behavior emerges in a MANET due to energy depletion. We define different levels of selfishness, and we investigate the protocol performance when the nodes inside the network exhibit different levels of selfishness.