Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Study on Cooperation Stimulation Mechanism in Route Discovery of Ad hoc Networks
Authors	HUANG Lei LIU Li-Xiang
Address	(National Key Laboratory of Integrated Information System Technology, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080)
Year	2008
Issue	No.2(262—269)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract How to stimulate selfish nodes which belong to different utility-maximizing entities to cooperate is a hot topic in Ad hoc network research community. Current mechanisms proposed so far focus mainly on detecting selfish behavior and stimulating cooperation in data forwarding stage. They are not applicable in route discovery stage. Based on statistics relationship of route request packets relayed and generated by a neighbor node, this paper proposed an algorithm to detect and punish the selfishness in route discovery stage for on-demand routing protocols. The algorithm was modeled with the tool of game theory as the repeated prisoner dilemma in noisy environment, and its effectiveness to stimulate cooperation was analyzed with the model. Theoretic analysis and simulation results showed that our scheme could punish the selfishness in route discovery effectively and thus stimulate nodes to cooperate. keywords Ad hoc network; routing; selfishness detection; cooperation stimulation; game theory background Mobile Ad-hoc networks are basically peer to peer multi-hop wireless networks. Key networking tasks must be carried out on the base of mutual cooperation among these nodes. If these nodes belong to different profit-maximizing entities, for example, in a commercial scenario, cooperation assumption doesn’t hold. To save the resources such as energy, a selfish node may refuse to relay the packets for others. How to stimulate selfish nodes to cooperate became a hot spot in Ad hoc network research community recently. Current studies proposed a lot of schemes to detect selfish dropping in data forwarding stage, such as watchdog or 2ACK. But it is easy to escape the detection of these schemes by just silent dropping control packets in route discovery stage. Because of the uncertainty in route discovery, it is hard to detect such kind of selfishness. This paper proposed a detection mechanism for silent dropping in route discovery based on the statistics of route control packet. Authors proved the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to stimulate cooperation with the tools of game theory and by simulation. This research is partially supported by the advanced research foundation of Chinese Academy of Sciences under grant No.9140A150301.