Comparative Study of Cooperation Tools for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks are formed spontaneously to use the wireless medium for communication among nodes. Each node in this type of network is its own authority and has an unpredictable behaviour. These features involve a cooperation challenge that has been addressed in previous proposals with methods based on virtual currencies. In this work, those methods have been simulated in NS-2 and the results have been analyzed, showing several weaknesses. In particular, it has been concluded that existent methods do not provide significant advances compared with networks without any mechanism for promoting cooperation. Consequently, this work presents three new proposals that try to solve those problems. The obtained results show that the new proposals offer significant improvements over previous schemes based on virtual currencies.