A Belief Evaluation Framework in Autonomous MANETs under Noisy and Imperfect Observation: Vulnerability Analysis and Cooperation Enforcement

In autonomous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) where each user is its own authority, the issue of cooperation enforcement must be solved first to enable networking functionalities such as packet forwarding, which becomes very difficult under noisy and imperfect monitoring. In this paper, we consider cooperation enforcement in autonomous mobile ad hoc networks under noisy and imperfect observation and study the basic packet forwarding among users through the repeated game models with imperfect information. A belief evaluation framework is proposed to obtain cooperation-enforcement packet forwarding strategies only based on each node's private information including its own past actions and imperfect observation of other nodes' information. More importantly, we not only show that the proposed strategy with belief system can maintain the cooperation paradigm but also establish its performance bounds. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed belief evaluation framework can enforce the cooperation with only a small performance degradation compared with the unconditionally cooperative outcomes when noisy and imperfect observation exist.