Non cooperative forwarding in ad hoc networks

A wireless Ad-hoc network is expected to be made up of energy aware entities (nodes) interested in their own perceived performance. An important problem in such a scenario is to provide incentives for collaboration among the participating entities. Forwarding packets of other nodes is an example of activity that requires such a collaboration. However, it may not be in interest of a node to always forward the requesting packets. At the same time, not forwarding any packet may adversly affect the network functioning. Assuming that the nodes are rational, i.e., their actions are strictly determined by their self-interest, we view the problem in framework of non-cooperative game theory and provide a simple punishing mechanism considering end-to-end performance objectives of the nodes. We also provide a distributed implementation of the proposed mechanism. This implementation has a small computational and storage complexity hence is suitable for the scenario under consideration.