A game theoretic approach for security and Quality of Service (QoS) co-design in MANETs with cooperative communications

Cooperative communication is proposed to form a virtual MIMO system through strategic relay selection to improve communication quality in wireless networks, including mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Due to their unorganized and decentralized infrastructure, MANETs with cooperative communications (CO-MANETs) are vulnerable to attacks initiated on relays. Although encryption and authentication protocols may prevent compromised data transmission when a selected relay is attacked, their cost is high. In this paper, we propose a game theoretic approach to quantitatively analyze the attack strategies of the attacker so as to make rational decision on relay selection and the authentication parameter adaptation to reach the trade-off between security and Quality of Service (QoS) in CO-MANETs. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for security and QoS co-design in CO-MANETs.