A gradual solution to detect selfish nodes in mobile ad hoc networks

The resource limitation of nodes forming ad hoc networks along with the multi-hop nature of these networks rise a new problem. To preserve its energy a node may behave selfishly and would not forward packets for others, while using their services and consuming their resources. This paper presents a new monitoring solution that mitigates limitations of the watchdog-based monitoring, upon which rely most of the state-of-the-art solutions. The overhead of the proposed solution, termed Two-hop acknowledgment, is gradually decreased; through the use of the lower layer acknowledgments (piggybacking), as well as aggregations. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd