Triple referee incentive mechanism for secure mobile adhoc networks

Abstract

In MANETs, the mobile nodes usually relay other nodes’ packets for the proper operation of the network. However, selfish nodes usually don’t cooperate in relaying other nodes’ packets but use the regular nodes to relay their packets. The increase in the number of selfish nodes affects the network performance badly. Existing protocols try to minimize the impact of selfish nodes with high computation overhead and/or communication overhead. In this paper, triple referee incentive mechanism is proposed that employs three referees to monitor the behavior of any intermediate node. In case of any selfish behavior, the packets will be bypassed through the referee nodes so that the data communication is uninterrupted in the network. In addition, the selfish nodes are motivated through incentives with less packet overhead. Hash operations are used in the data packets and acknowledgement packets instead of the public key cryptography operations so that the average packet overhead is less than that of the public key cryptography based incentive protocols. Hash values are used to attain payment non repudiation and restrain free riding attacks.