A hierarchical account-aided Reputation Management system for large-scale MANETs

Encouraging cooperative and deterring selfish behaviors are important for proper operations of MANETs. For this purpose, most previous efforts either rely on reputation systems or price systems. However, both systems are neither sufficiently effective in providing cooperation incentives nor efficient in resource consumption. Nodes in both systems can be uncooperative while still being considered trustworthy. Also, information exchange between mobile nodes in reputation systems and credit circulation in price systems consume significant resources. This paper presents a hierarchical Account-aided Reputation Management system (ARM) to efficiently and effectively provide cooperation incentives. ARM builds a hierarchical locality-aware DHT infrastructure for efficient and integrated operations of both reputation and price systems. The infrastructure helps to globally collect all reputation information in the system, which helps to calculate more accurate reputation and detect abnormal reputation information. Also, ARM coordinately integrates resource and price systems by enabling higher-reputed nodes to pay less for their received services. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the properties of ARM. Simulation results show that ARM outperforms both a reputation system and price system in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.