Quantitative Study on the Impact of Energy Consumption Based Dynamic Selfishness in MANETs

Cooperative communication and resource limitation are two main characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). On one hand, communication among the nodes in MANETs highly depends on the cooperation among nodes because of the limited transmission range of the nodes, and multi-hop communications are needed in most cases. On the other hand, every node in MANETs has stringent resource constraints on computations, communications, memory, and energy. These two characteristics lead to the existence of selfish nodes in MANETs, which affects the network performance in various aspects. In this paper, we quantitatively investigate the impacts of node selfishness caused by energy depletion in MANETs in terms of packet loss rate, round-trip delay, and throughput. We conducted extensive measurements on a proper simulation platform incorporating an OMNeT++ and INET Framework. Our experimental results quantitatively indicate the impact of node selfishness on the network performance in MANETs. The results also imply that it is important to evaluate the impact of node selfishness by jointly considering selfish nodes' mobility models, densities, proportions, and combinations.