ARM: An Account-Based Hierarchical Reputation Management System for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networking works properly only if mobile nodes cooperate in routing. However, since wireless mobile nodes are usually constrained by limited power and computation resources, some selfish nodes may refuse to forward packets which are not of their direct interest. Most previous efforts counter this behavior by having each node keep a reputation table and exchanging the information with each other, and refusing to forward the packets of selfish nodes. Maintaining and exchanging information among individual mobile nodes in a dynamic environment consumes significant resources, and such a punishment method is not effective enough. This paper presents a novel Account-based hierarchical Reputation Management system (ARM) to avoid selfish nodes and encourage node cooperation. In order to save there source consumption of information exchange, ARM builds a hierarchical structure with low mobility nodes in the high level. These nodes constitute a locality-aware DHT for efficient reputation value collection and exchange. %the storage and computing burden of the mobile nodes. Furthermore, ARM provides a novel account management model to encourage node cooperation in the network. The account management model intelligently integrates global reputation management reputation system and pricing-based model for effective selfish node punishment. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that ARM can greatly improve the performance of a defenseless network by effectively deterring selfish nodes and encouraging node cooperation at a significantly low resource consumption.