• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.1593-1608
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• 2009

If a certain relay node in multi-hop wireless networks might become a malicious node that does not cooperate with other nodes or a selfish node, network throughput will be dramatically decreased. Most of existing ad hoc routing protocols assuming that the nodes will fully cooperate with other nodes do not resolve the problem of network performance degradation due to malicious and selfish nodes. This paper presents the CARE (Cooperative Ad hoc routing protocol based REputation) scheme incorporating the reputation management that can achieve a multi-hop wireless network with high throughput performance. The proposed scheme provides the horizontal cross-layer approach which can identify misbehaving malicious, selfish nodes dropped out of the hop-by-hop based packet processing in the network and then set up an optimal packet routing path that will detour misbehaving nodes. And the vertical cross-layer approach contained in the CARE scheme attempts to improve the quality of routing paths by exploiting the quality of link information received from the MAC layer. Besides, it provides high TCP throughput by exploiting the reputation values of nodes acquired from the network layer into the transport layer. A case study on experiments and simulations shows that the CARE scheme incorporating vertical and horizontal cross-layer approaches yields better performance in terms of the low rate of packet loss, fast average packet delivery time, and high TCP throughput between end-to-end nodes.