Secure Cooperation in Autonomous Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks Under Noise and Imperfect Monitoring: A Game-Theoretic Approach

In autonomous mobile ad-hoc networks, one major challenge is to stimulate cooperation among selfish nodes, especially when some nodes may be malicious. In this paper, we address cooperation stimulation in realistic yet challenging contexts where the environment is noisy and the underlying monitoring is imperfect. We have first explored the underlying reasons why stimulating cooperation under such scenarios is difficult. Instead of trying to enforce all nodes to act fully cooperatively, our goal is to stimulate cooperation in a hostile environment as much as possible through playing conditional altruism. To formally address the problem, we have modeled the interactions among nodes as secure routing and packet forwarding games under noise and imperfect observation, and devised a set of reputation-based attack-resistant cooperation strategies without requiring any tamper-proof hardware or central banking service. The performance of the devised strategies has also been evaluated analytical...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TIFS
• Authors: Wei Yu, K. J. Ray Liu
• Keywords: Autonomous Mobile Ad-hoc, Cooperation Strategies, Devised Strategies, TIFS 2008