Security and quality of service (QoS) co-design in cooperative mobile ad hoc networks

Cooperative communication has been considered as a promising technique to improve communication quality of service (QoS) in wireless networks, including mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Due to their unorganized and decentralized infrastructure, cooperative MANETs (CO-MANETs) are vulnerable to attacks initiated on relays. Although encryption and authentication protocols may prevent compromised data transmission when a selected relay is attacked, their cost is high. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic approach to quantitatively analyze the attack strategies of the attacker so as to make a rational decision on relay selection and the authentication parameter adaptation to reach a trade-off between security and QoS in CO-MANETs. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for security and QoS co-design in CO-MANETs.