Detecting selfish nodes and motivating cooperation in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a dynamic wireless network without fixed infrastructure. Nodes move freely and organize themselves arbitrarily, and they usually have limited resources. Therefore, data delivery through this network requires cooperation among network nodes. Selfishness is a challenging problem that significantly degrades performance in MANETs. In this paper, we propose a selfishness detect-and-motivate (SDM) approach that detects selfish nodes and motivates them to cooperate in data delivery. We built a MANET simulator and implemented the proposed approach, and compared its performance with a selfishness detect-and-isolate (SDI) approach and a selfishness unaware (SU) approach. Results shows that the proposed approach achieves better performance in terms of dropped packets under different scenarios.