A Credit-Based Incentive Mechanism for Recommendation Acquisition in Multihop Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Trust and reputation systems play an important role in collaborative operations in mobile ad hoc networks. However, the security of trust and reputation system itself is threatened by the existence of selfish nodes. Selfish nodes can make passive attacks on the foundational process of trust and reputation system, the recommendation acquisition, through non cooperation of packet forwarding and recommendation rendering. Existing trust and reputation systems commonly suffer from vulnerability caused by the failure of recommendation acquisition which refers to the unsuccessful recommendation information obtaining from one node to another node. A credit-based mechanism is proposed to address this problem by offering credits as incentives to both intermediate nodes and recommendation render nodes. Furthermore, competition between selfish nodes is explored to prevent selfish nodes being paid excessive credits. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively improve the success rate of recommendation acquisition and lower the total paid payoffs.