A Mechanism for Handling Selfish Nodes using Credit in Sensor Networks

The purpose of sensor network is gathering the information from sensor nodes. If there are selfish node that deliberately avoid packet forwarding to save their own energy, the sensor network has trouble to collect information smoothly. To solve this problem we suggest a mechanism which uses credit payment schema according to the amount of forwarding packets. Sensor nodes use credits to send their own message and they forward packets of other sensor nodes to get credits. To offer authenticity we combined the roles of sink node and server, also we used piggybacking not to send additional report message. The packet trace route is almost fixed because sensor node doesn't have mobility. In this case, it happens that some sensor nodes which don't receive forwarding packets therefore they can't get credit. So, we suggested the way to give more credits to these sensor nodes. Finally, we simulated the suggested mechanism to evaluate performance with ns2(network simulator). As a result, packet transmission rate was kept on a high rate and the number of arrival packets to sink node was increased. Also, we could verify that more sensor nodes live longer due to deceasing the energy consumption of sensor nodes.