A Novel Incentive-Based and Hardware-Independent Cooperation Mechanism for MANETs

One of the most challenging issues in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) arena, which consist of autonomous and self interested nodes, is the problem of providing incentives for nodes to cooperate in forwarding network packets. In this paper, we propose Express as a cooperation mechanism which is both efficient in computations imposed on mobile nodes and secure against deceptive threats by nodes. Using Express, network nodes gain credit for participating in forwarding network packets. Recent works utilize digital signatures to provide security against cheating actions by nodes. Express substitutes hash operations for digital signature operations as much as possible, which consequently reduces computational overhead to a great extent. Setting credits and penalties through this mechanism, each node beneficially tends to adopt cooperative behavior.