SN-Pass Scheme for Flow Control and Incentive Engineering in Non-Cooperative MANETs

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is formed by a group of mobile nodes connected by wire-less links. The nodes can talk to each other by direct peer-to-peer wireless communication when they are close to each other. When the sender and receiver are far away, their packets can be forwarded by the intermediate nodes along a multi-hop path. As an emerging networking technique, a MANET is envisioned to become a stand-alone network for a group of mobile users, or as a stub-network to connect to the Internet. In this paper, we focus on the flow control problem in this network. Depending on whether the routers agree to forward packets for each other, different flow control schemes are proposed for both cooperative and non-cooperative MANET environments. Traditionally, flow control has been studied in a cooperative network environment. But co-operative behavior is not a realistic assumption in a public MANET formed by a random group of strangers. Users in this network are likely to behave selfishly, by refusing to forward other users' packets. Under this non-cooperative environment, flow control and incentive engineering are two problems closely related to each other. A flow control solution would be meaningless if the inter-mediate routers do not agree to carry the traffic for others. However, existing work in incentive engineering provides only stand-alone solutions and fails to recognize its close relation with flow control. Hence, we propose a scheme called which SN-Pass, is a joint solution for flow control and incentive engineering in MANETs. SN-Pass adopts the "pay for service" model of cooperation and utilizes an auction mechanism at each router to fairly allocate bandwidth resources. Therefore, SN-Pass provides an innovative and graceful solution for the flow control and incentive engineering problems in a non-cooperative MANET environment.