Analysis of cooperation strategies in mobile ad hoc networks with imperfect monitoring

This paper focuses on the formal assessment of the properties of
cooperation enforcement mechanisms used to detect and prevent selfish behavior of
nodes forming a mobile ad hoc network. In the first part, we demonstrate the
requirement for a cooperation enforcement mechanism using cooperative game theory
that allows us to determine a lower bound on the size of coalitions of cooperating
nodes. In the second part, using non-cooperative game theory, we compare our
cooperation enforcement mechanism CORE to other popular mechanisms. Under the
hypothesis of perfect monitoring of node behavior, CORE appears to be equivalent to
a wide range of history-based strategies like tit-for-tat. Further, adopting a more
realistic assumption taking into account imperfect monitoring due to probable
communication errors, the non-cooperative model puts in evidence the superiority of
CORE over other history-based schemes.