Credit-Based Incentives in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Given the resource consumption of transmitting data packets in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET), selfish nodes might refuse to transmit messages to others just for maximizing their own profits. Therefore, the communication performance within the whole network would be affected. Along with its wide-scale implementation in many road-side applications, selfish behaviors of such nodes are witnessed to be causing serious problems and degradations in VANETs. We address the impacts of the selfish nodes in the performance of VANETs and accordingly, the credit-based method is utilized to re-implement the spirit that can provide incentive for mobile nodes to cooperate with each other and report actions honestly. The simulation results demonstrated that the system earnings would decrease due to the existence of selfish nodes, thereby also proving that the incentive mechanism can facilitate mutual cooperation among nodes.