A light-weight solution for selfish nodes problem considering battery status in wireless ad-hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), nodes depend on each other for routing and forwarding packets. Cooperation among nodes is a key issue in such an environment. However, some of the nodes in MANETs may behave selfishly and may not forward packets to save battery and other resources. Since nodes in MANETs communicate on a peer-to-peer basis without any central authority (which can monitor selfish behavior of nodes), a centralized solution to stimulate cooperation is not suitable. In this paper, we present a fully distributed solution to force nodes' cooperation. The solution is light-weight in that neighbor monitoring is on-demand, and nodes work in promiscuous mode only part time to save battery. Besides, we provide fairness to nodes in the network by considering their battery status. We incorporate our light-weight solution for selfish node problems considering battery status in AODV. To evaluate the performance of our scheme, we conducted simulation using Glomosim. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves data forwarding capability substantially in presence of selfish nodes, identifies the selfish nodes accurately and has low overhead.