Towards Tag-based Cooperation for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Cooperation between nodes in packet forwarding is crucial to enable multi-hop communication in mobile ad hoc networks. However, in self-organizing mobile ad hoc networks where each node acts as its own authority, nodes are self-interested and tempted to drop each other´s packets in order to conserve their limited resources. This selfish behavior can make it impossible to achieve multi-hop communication and high delivery success. A large number of studies have proposed different cooperation enforcement mechanisms for mobile ad hoc networks, however, most of them require each node to maintain memory of past interactions. This requirement can be a significant problem in open and large mobile ad hoc networks. In response, we propose a tag-based cooperation enforcement mechanism which enables cooperation to be enforced in mobile ad hoc networks without the need to maintain such memory.