Belief-based packet forwarding in self-organized mobile ad hoc networks with noise and imperfect observation

In self-organized mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) where each user is its own authority, fully cooperative behaviors, such as unconditionally forwarding packets for each other, cannot be directly assumed. In this paper, we focus on cooperation enforcement in the self-organized mobile ad hoc networks with noise and imperfect observation and study the basic packet-forwarding function using the repeated game models with imperfect information. A belief-based packet forwarding framework is proposed to obtain cooperation-enforcement strategies solely based on each node´s own past actions and its private imperfect observation of other nodes´ information. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed belief-based packet forwarding approach can enforce the cooperation with only a small performance degradation compared to the unconditionally cooperative outcomes in the ad hoc networks with noise and imperfect observation