A reputation-based mechanism to enforce cooperation in MANETs

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network is a kind of mobile wireless network which is self-configuring and decentralized without having a fix infrastructure. However, all the network activities will be done by the nodes themselves. In such networks, each node is both an end-system as well as a relay node to forward packets for other nodes. The assumption of cooperation of all the nodes in transmitting and routing operation is very optimistic because some of the nodes as the selfish nodes use the network and its services but they havenpsilat any cooperation with other nodes. Such selfish nodes do not consume any energy such as CPU power, battery and also bandwidth for retransmitting the data of other nodes and they reserve them only for themselves. In this paper we used the reputation system to propose a reputation based approach which enforces such selfish nodes to cooperate in the network. In comparison with other suggested approaches such as CONFIDENT approach, in the proposed approach the number of messages and also the number of dropped packets is reduced. Also, according to the simulation results, it has a considerably lower overhead in spite of preserving the efficiency of network.