A Game for Ad Hoc Network Connectivity in the Presence of Malicious Users

Ad hoc network users are resource constrained: Before transmitting data, they have to take into account the energy expenditure involved. Even if a user is, in principle, willing to spend energy to improve network connectivity, his actual decision will be heavily influenced by the decisions of his neighboring users, since they act as relay nodes for him. Moreover, some of the neighbors may not be as benign as he is; in fact, they could be outright malicious. We are abstracting the tradeoff between spending energy and increasing connectivity by modeling the interaction of a user with his one-hop neighbors in a game theoretic fashion. Two types of users exist: Good users willingly trade energy for connectivity, but only if they expect their neighbors to do the same; Bad users try to destroy connectivity, but also lure the Good users to waste energy. Within our model for user behavior and sophistication, we explore outcomes that can arise in this graphical game.