Incentivando a cooperação em redes Ad Hoc

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) refer to the wireless networks without a fixed infrastructure and a central administration. In this way, the communication management is self-organized by the mobile nodes in the network. The mobile nodes in MANETs can have a router role. These nodes are known as intermediate nodes and they have na important role to maintain the network connectivity forwarding packets for the benefit of other nodes. Because the small range of the radio transmission, most of the móbile nodes (sender and receiver) cannot usually communicate with each other directly. So the communications are relying on multihop routing. Routing protocols for MANETs assume that the nodes are willing to participate in the cooperative packets forwarding, however, in the packet transmission stage it is verified a great resource consumption (e.g., processing and energy). Since forwarding a packet will incur a cost of energy to a node, the nodes can have a selfish behavior avoiding send packets to save their resources. This work describes an autonomous strategy to provide an incentive for mobile nodes to cooperate in a credit-based system. A node receives credit for forwarding a packet while the sender node looses credit. As an incentive for mobile nodes to cooperate they receive a better quality of service (QoS). This strategy uses the amount of credits to classify the ows inside routers nodes. This strategy uses only local information and it does not have a central entity to manage the credit of the nodes. The simulations show that this strategy is efiective to prioritize packets sent by cooperative nodes.