Novel routing protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with selfish and altruistic nodes

Abstract

Selfish behavior may be observed in a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) due to restricted resources. Unlike the past research which aimed to suppress that kind of behavior and isolate selfish nodes, we propose a scheme which exploits selfish behavior to improve the routing protocol's performance. We introduce an altruism coefficient which represents each node's overall satisfaction from the network services and while increased, it decreases selfish behavior. We then apply our scheme to an existing routing protocol and evaluate its performance. We show by simulation, that when selfish nodes exist in the network, our scheme improves the performance of the routing protocol.