Towards Reliable Forwarding for Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networking is a new paradigm of wireless communications for mobile nodes. Mobile ad hoc networks work properly only if the partecipating nodes cooperate to network protocols. Cooperative algorithms make the system vulnerable to user misbehavior as well as to malicious and selfish misbehavior. Nodes act selfishly to save battery power, by not cooperating to routing-forwarding functions. Lack of cooperation may severely degrade the performance of the ad hoc system. This paper presents a new approach to cope with cooperation misbehavior, focusing on the forwarding function. We present a general framework, based on reliability indices taking into account not only selfish/malicious misbehavior, but also situations of congestion and jammed links. We aim at avoiding unreliable routes and enforcing cooperation, thus increasing network “performability” (performance and reliability).