Sustaining cooperation in multi-hop wireless networks

  • Authors:
  • Ratul Mahajan;Maya Rodrig;David Wetherall;John Zahorjan

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Washington;University of Washington;University of Washington;University of Washington

  • Venue:
  • NSDI'05 Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Multi-hop wireless networks are vulnerable to free-riders because they require nodes to forward packets for each other. Deployed routing protocols ignore this issue while proposed solutions incorporate complicated mechanisms with the intent of making free-riding impossible. We present Catch, a protocol that falls between these extremes. It achieves nearly the low mechanism requirements of the former while imposing nearly as effective barriers to free-riding as the latter. Catch is made possible by novel techniques based on anonymous messages. These techniques enable cooperative nodes to detect nearby free-riders and disconnect them from the rest of the network. Catch has low overhead and is broadly applicable across routing protocols and traffic workloads. We evaluate it on an 802.11 wireless testbed as well as through simulation.