  In mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), nodes usually belong to different
authorities and pursue different goals. In order to maximize their own
performance, nodes in such networks tend to be selfish and are not willing to
forward packets for benefit of others. Meanwhile, some nodes may behave
maliciously and try to disrupt the network through wasting other nodes
resources in a very large scale. In this article, we present a reputation-based
attack resistant cooperation stimulation (RACS) system which ensures that
damage caused by malicious nodes can be bounded and cooperation among the
selfish nodes can be enforced. Mathematical analyses of the system as well as
the simulation results have confirmed effectiveness of our proposed system.
RACS is completely self-organizing and distributed. It does not require any
tamper-proof hardware or central management policy.
