A new reputation-based cooperation enforcement scheme for MANETs

In mobile ad hoc networks, selfish nodes show non-cooperative behaviors due to discarding packets to save their resources (such as energy), which will seriously affect the network performance. A new cooperation enforcement scheme called CMC is proposed to mitigate this problem. In the CMC, the common neighbor monitoring technique is introduced to help the watchdog monitor all packets transmitting around it so that the system can detect the non-cooperative nodes more quickly. In the routing discovery phase, the route request packets and the route reply packets that contain non-cooperative nodes are dropped by CMC, so that the probability that a well-behaved node uses a bad route for data transmission is reduced. The ns-2 simulation results show that the CMC can improve the throughput of well-behaved nodes by 10%-40% in the presence of 10%-60% non-cooperative nodes.