Cooperation Enforcement in Autonomous MANETs under Noise and Imperfect Observation

In autonomous mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) where each user is its own authority, the issue of cooperation enforcement must be solved first to enable network functioning, such as packet forwarding, which becomes very difficult under noise and imperfect monitoring. In this paper, we focus on cooperation enforcement in autonomous mobile ad hoc networks under noise and imperfect observation and study the basic packet-forwarding function using the repeated game models with imperfect information. A belief-based packet forwarding framework is proposed to obtain cooperation-enforcement strategies solely based on each node´s own past actions and its private imperfect observation of other nodes´ information. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed belief-based packet forwarding approach can enforce the cooperation with only a small performance degradation compared with the unconditionally cooperative outcomes when noise and imperfect observation exist