A reputation-based service differentiation scheme for mobile ad hoc networks

Providing a guaranteed quality of service is a challenging task in mobile ad hoc networks. However, relative guarantees can be achieved without resource reservations, admission control or traffic policing. A differentiated services approach can be employed to provide relative guarantees for different classes of services. Existing proposals for enforcing cooperation in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) do not provide service differentiations. Without distinguishing between various classes of nodes in the network, the provision of equal services to all participating nodes does not guarantee full cooperation in the network. In this paper, we propose a service differentiation mechanism for MANETs based on reputation ratings. The basic idea is to encourage nodes to cooperate by providing better services to more cooperative nodes. The proposed scheme has been evaluated in a simulation environment using various performance metrics. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can successfully motivate non-cooperating nodes, achieve service differentiation objective and improve the performance of both individual nodes and the overall network.