Game Theoretic Analysis of Cooperation Stimulation and Security in Autonomous Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In autonomous mobile ad hoc networks, nodes belong to different authorities and pursue different goals; therefore, cooperation among them cannot be taken for granted. Meanwhile, some nodes may be malicious, whose objective is to damage the network. In this paper, we present a joint analysis of cooperation stimulation and security in autonomous mobile ad hoc networks under a game theoretic framework. We first investigate a simple yet illuminating two-player packet forwarding game and derive the optimal and cheat-proof packet forwarding strategies. We then investigate the secure routing and packet forwarding game for autonomous ad hoc networks in noisy and hostile environments and derive a set of reputation-based cheat-proof and attack-resistant cooperation stimulation strategies. When analyzing the cooperation strategies, besides Nash equilibrium, other optimality criteria, such as Pareto optimality, subgame perfection, fairness, and cheat-proofing, have also been considered. Both analysis and simulation studies have shown that the proposed strategies can effectively stimulate cooperation among selfish nodes in autonomous mobile ad hoc networks under noise and attacks, and the damage that can be caused by attackers is bounded and limited