Truthful and Secure Routing in Ad Hoc Networks

Cooperation among nodes is vital in wireless networks since in such networks nodes depend on each other for routing packets. However, cooperation in such operations consumes nodes recourses such as battery and bandwidth. Therefore, it is necessary to design incentive mechanisms to enforce nodes to forward packets when the source and destination of the packet are other nodes. We study routing in wireless networks from a game theoretic viewpoint. Based on this view, the network consists of greedy and selfish nodes who accept payments for forwarding data for other nodes if the payments cover their individual costs incurred by forwarding data. Also, route falsification attacks are easy to launch by malicious nodes in wireless networks. These nodes falsify data and routes in the network. Thus, mitigating this attack is vital for the performance of the whole network. Previous routing protocols in wireless networks inspired by game theory just consider that network consists of selfish nodes. In this work, we consider that the network consists of malicious nodes too. Here we present a secure and truthful mechanism for routing in wireless networks that cope selfish and malicious nodes.