Stimulating cooperation and defending against attacks in self-organized mobile ad hoc networks

In self-organized mobile ad hoc networks, nodes belong to different authorities and pursue different goals, so they tend to be selfish, that is, they try to maximize the benefits they can get from the network, but are not willing to forward packets for the benefits of other nodes. Meanwhile, some nodes may be malicious whose objective is to degrade the network's performance and waste other nodes' valuable resource. Here we propose an Attack-Resilient Cooperation Stimulation (ARCS) system for self-organized mobile ad hoc networks to stimulate cooperation among selfish nodes and to defend against attacks. In the ARCS system, the damage that can be caused by malicious nodes is bounded, and the cooperation among selfish nodes is enforced. Both theoretical analysis and simulation studies have confirmed the effectiveness of the ARCS system. Another key property of the ARCS system lies in that it is completely self-organizing and fully distributed, and does not require any tamper-proof hardware or central management points.