Preventing selfish behavior in Ad Hoc networks

Cooperation enforcement is one of the key issues in ad hoc networks. In this paper we proposes a new strategy driven approach that aims at discouraging selfish behavior among network participants. Each node is using a strategy that defines conditions under which packets are being forwarded. Such strategy is based on the notion of trust and activity of the source node of the packet. This way network participants are forced to forward packets and to reduce the amount of time spent in a sleep mode. To evaluate strategies we use a new game theory based model of an ad hoc network. A genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to find good strategies. Experimental results show that our approach makes selfish behavior unattractive.