RAMP: a reputation-aware multi-hop routing protocol in wireless ad-hoc networks

Abstract

In multi-hop routing protocols within Wireless Ad-hoc Networks (MANET), all the nodes are assumed to be cooperative. However, this assumption might not hold especially when the nodes behave selfishly to reduce their own resource utilization or there exist intentional attackers. Therefore, how to enforce the cooperative behavior is an important issue in MANET. In this paper, we propose a Reputation-Aware Multi-hop routing Protocol (RAMP) to enforce node cooperation. We take advantage of congestion control from Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to quantify the reputation/trust value of each node, which makes the selfish behaviors not attractive in MANET. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to integrate the congestion control from TCP for the reputation-based system design. In addition, the respective simulation in NS2 shows RAMP could achieve 10--15% less packet loss than the existing reputation-based scheme such as CONFIDANT and RAMP could outperform CONFIDANT by up to 20% in goodput with the presence of the compromised/selfish nodes.