Towards cooperation fairness in mobile ad hoc networks

For the sustainable operation of ad hoc networks, incentive mechanisms are required to encourage cooperation. More importantly, we must enforce available bandwidth fairness among nodes. Bandwidth sharing is fair if a node´s available bandwidth is proportional to its forwarding contribution. In this paper, we achieve fair bandwidth sharing through a new packet scheduling algorithm, called cooperative queueing, on each node. In cooperative queueing, which is analogous to fair queueing, packet scheduling is based on a new abstraction that we call cooperation coefficient (CC). The CC quantifies how much a given node contributes to and consumes from the ad-hoc network; the larger the CC, the more bandwidth a node can obtain. We exploit the widely used dynamic source routing information to obtain the CC. We evaluate the effectiveness of cooperative queueing with different parameters and network configurations. We demonstrate that our algorithm is able to encourage cooperation and ensure fair sharing of bandwidth between nodes. We show that cooperative queueing is simple and has little overhead.