Analysis and Countermeasure of Selfish Node Problem in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

MANET (mobile ad hoc network) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary communication network without the aid of any established infrastructure. Because mobile nodes are typically constrained by power and computing resources, a selfish node may not be willing to use its computing and energy resources to forward packets that are not directly beneficial to it, even though it expects others to forward packets on its behalf. This paper not only analyzes the effect of two typical kinds of selfish nodes through simulation methods, but also proposes resolving strategy respectively. For type 1 selfish node, this paper proposes CI-DSR (cooperation inspirited dynamic source routing) protocol, which introduces an objective reputation-based strategy into the DSR protocol. For type 2 selfish nodes, a self-saving energy strategy is proposed. Simulations indicate that both of two strategies can effectively tradeoff the selfishness and cooperation