Quantitative Study on Impact of Node Selfishness on Performance of MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are kinds of wireless networks that are various features like dynamic mobility, constraint resources, fully decentralized etc. The communication among the nodes highly depends on the cooperation between nodes. Data forwarding is the main task during the communication process. Because of constraint of limited resources, it is rational that some nodes behave selfishly and refuse to burden forwarding tasks for others. In this paper, we quantitatively investigate the impacts of node selfishness in MANETs from various aspects, including mobility, presence, and combination of selfish nodes. The network performance is assessed in terms of average packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay. We carried out extensive simulations on OMNeT++ platform and analyzed the results. Our results quantitatively showed that node selfishness has significant impacts on the communication performance in MANETs. As a result, our experimental results imply that the impact of node selfishness should be evaluated in an integrated way of mobility, presence and combination.