A Novel Charging and Accounting Scheme in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Because of the lack of infrastructure in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), their proper functioning must rely on co-operations among mobile nodes. However, mobile nodes tend to save their own resources and may be reluctant to forward packets for other nodes. One approach to encourage co-operations among nodes is to reward nodes that forward data for others. Such an incentive-based scheme requires a charging and accounting framework to control and manage rewards and fines (collected from users committing infractions). In this paper, we propose a novel charging and accounting scheme for MANETs. We present a detailed description of the proposed scheme and demonstrate its effectiveness via formal proofs and simulation results [15]. We develop a theoretical game model that offers advice to network administrators about the allocation of resources for monitoring mobile nodes. The solution provides the optimal monitoring probability, which discourages nodes from cheating because the gain would be compensated by the penalty.