COVE:A Credit-based Mechanism To Motivate Cooperation In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Network is consisted of a set of mobile nodes without relying on fixed infrastructure forming wireless multiple hops Network. Vehicular ad hoc network(VANET) is a specific mobile ad hoc network in traffic applications, which has significant research value and extensive application prospects. In order to enhance traffic safety and efficiency, Vehicular ad hoc network offers many applications. Thus, these applications require cooperation between nodes to meet these functions. In Vehicular ad hoc network, due to the consumption of resources(such as CPU) of helping other nodes to forward packets, some nodes may choose to refuse to help other nodes in order to maximize their own profits, such nodes are called selfish nodes. The existence of selfish nodes may lead to the latency or failure of the packets forwarded from the source node to the destination node. If things go on like this, the entire network communication performance of the system will be affected.Considering the influence of the network communication performance of selfish nodes, a lot of research work of this issue was done to comprehend more, and finally, we put forward a method which is credit based, COVE, for stimulating cooperation among the mobile nodes and prompting nodes to be honest when reporting their own behaviors based on previous research work. COVE will alter the assignment scheme of credit value according to different results of transmitting packets. Cooperative nodes will gain more than selfish nodes, and then it does motivate the selfish nodes to choose the behavior of cooperation. MATLAB is utilized to evaluate the performance of the method via simulation. In the experiment, different number of selfish nodes are set in the network for different groups. Then the influence of COVE can be testified through the comparison of welfare of every group. At the same time, various parameters of contrast experiment are also set to verify the effectiveness and the extent of award and punishment of the method. The simulation results show that with the increase of number of selfish nodes, the profit of system reduces. And compared with the previous research results, the benefits of selfish nodes are also reduced. It is evident that the incentive mechanism can promote the cooperation among the nodes in VANET more efficiently.