Cooperation incentives in wireless ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks heavily rely on nodes' cooperation for packet forwarding. As a result, misbehaving, malicious, and selfish nodes can significantly degrade the performance of the network. To cope with this issue and to stimulate cooperation among selfish mobile nodes, a continuous research effort is done on identifying nodes trust and reputation. In this paper, we survey recently proposed reputation and incentive schemes for ad hoc networks. In order to help in the design of different reputation systems tailored to specific applications and network topologies, we classify the different approaches that have been used in the literature and present the different alternatives for each approach. Finally, we conclude this paper and present suggestions for future work. © 2010 IEEE.