A metric to increase throughput in untrustworthy multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Node selfishness refers to nodes that use the resources of a multi-hop wireless mesh network but do not perform their basic network responsibilities of route management and packet forwarding. A security concern in mesh networks is that nodes may become selfish users of the network in order to conserve their processing power and limit other´s use of their network bandwidth. This results in poor network performance and unreliable network paths. In this paper, a distributed trust mechanism is proposed to identify selfish nodes and exclude them from the network. A novel path metric is also proposed that rates network routes according to the trustworthiness of the intermediate nodes. Through experimentation on a practical evaluation framework, it is shown that the proposed mechanisms can increase the overall traffic throughput of mesh networks in which selfish nodes are present