A Hierarchical Account-Aided Reputation Management System for MANETs

Encouraging cooperation and deterring selfish behaviors are important for proper operations of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). For this purpose, most previous efforts rely on either reputation systems or price systems. However, these systems are neither sufficiently effective in providing cooperation incentives nor sufficiently efficient in resource consumption. Nodes in both systems can be uncooperative while still being considered trustworthy. Also, information exchange between mobile nodes in reputation systems and credit circulation in price systems consumes significant resources. This paper presents a hierarchical Account-aided Reputation Management system (ARM) to efficiently and effectively provide cooperation incentives. ARM builds a hierarchical locality-aware distributed hash table (DHT) infrastructure for efficient and integrated operation of both reputation and price systems. The infrastructure helps to globally collect all node reputation information in the system, which can be used to calculate more accurate reputation and detect abnormal reputation information. Also, ARM integrates reputation and price systems by enabling higher-reputed nodes to pay less for their received services. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the properties of ARM. Simulation results show that ARM outperforms the individual reputation system and price system in terms of effectiveness and efficiency of providing cooperation incentives and deterring selfish behaviors.