An efficient reputation-based mechanism to enforce cooperation in MANETs

In wireless AdHoc networks, all its nodes behave as routers and take part in its discovery and maintenance of routs to other nodes. Therefore, the cooperation of nodes is very important. With presence of selfish or malicious nodes the performance of the network may greatly degrade. In order to enforce the cooperation between the nodes in the system many cooperation schemes have been proposed. This paper analyzes the typical cooperation schemes and then presents an efficient reputation-based mechanism to enforce cooperation in MANET. This approach also is based on constantly monitoring and updating first-hand and second-hand information. The nodes with in the network are able to monitor their neighbors and obtain the first-hand information based on the perceived behavior, second-hand information is obtained from the sharing of first-hand information with other nodes. The total reputation value is a function of first-hand and second-hand information. The simulation results show that in comparison with other suggested approach such as CONFIDANT approach, in the proposed approach the number of dropped packet is reduced. Also according to the simulation results it has a considerably lower overhead in spite of preserving the efficiency of network.