Reputation Measure for Incentive-Compatible Packet Forwarding in Ad Hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks are usually made of selfish mobile nodes which act to meet the benefit of themselves. A mass of researches have carried out to overcome the problems in these selfish networks, including packet forwarding. A class of reputation based schemes has been proposed for the problem, but almost all of them ignore the incentive compatibility of punishment. Punishing a noncooperative actor always costs the punisher a number of resources, which can cause second-ordered free riding that selfish nodes should free ride the punisher by acting cooperatively unconditionally and avoid the cost of punishment. The paper discusses this problem for packet forwarding in ad hoc networks and proposes two solutions based on second-ordered reputation, one is called probabilistic service assignment rule and the other is called proportional assignment rule. When network load is high, only the first one is effective.