Self-policing mobile ad hoc networks by reputation systems

Node misbehavior due to selfish or malicious reasons or faulty nodes can significantly degrade the performance of mobile ad hoc networks. To cope with misbehavior in such self-organized networks, nodes need to be able to automatically adapt their strategy to changing levels of cooperation. Existing approaches such as economic incentives or secure routing by cryptography alleviate some of the problems, but not all. We describe the use of a self-policing mechanism based on reputation to enable mobile ad hoc networks to keep functioning despite the presence of misbehaving nodes. The reputation system in all nodes makes them detect misbehavior locally by observation and use of second-hand information. Once a misbehaving node is detected it is automatically isolated from the network. We classify the features of such reputation systems and describe possible implementations of each of them. We explain in particular how it is possible to use second-hand information while mitigating contamination by spurious ratings.