Quantifying selfishness and fairness in wireless multihop networks

In wireless multihop networks, cooperation is of utmost importance to ensure the success of communication. However, due to limited resources especially energy, nodes may be compelled to adopt selfish behaviour by not forwarding packets for other nodes. Selfishness is a very subjective element to be measured because it is hard to determine whether or not a particular node´s behaviour is intentional or a consequence of the environment. Most, if not all, published work assumed that this behaviour can be assessed but do not explicitly describe how selfishness is measured or quantified. In this paper, we propose a method to quantify a node´s behaviour in forwarding packets for other nodes from the perspective of a single observer node (i.e. first-hand observation) and provide quantifiable metrics to represent the node´s actual effort. We show that by using the proposed method, we are able to classify several types of selfishness and fairness behaviour.