Detection of selfish partners by control packets in ARQ-based CSMA cooperative networks

Cooperation in wireless networks is beneficial for both throughput and power consumption, but requires that nodes are willing to cooperate. As the Nash equilibrium for each node would be a non-cooperative strategy, monitoring nodes’ behavior is essential to ensure cooperation. In this paper we present a monitoring approach for networks implementing automatic repeat request (ARQ) and carrier sense multiple access (CSMA). Node misbehavior is detected by listening to all control packets in the network and comparing the packet decoding probability when the monitored node is a destination and when it is a potential cooperator. For this detection strategy, we derive the false alarm and miss detection probabilities, which allow to properly design the system parameters. In order to further improve detection, we propose a distance-based method, where the estimate of the decoding probabilities is improved by enforcing geometric constraints on position of nodes. Both analytical and simulated results are presented for a wireless network characterized by both path-loss and fading.