A Dempster-Shafer Based Tit-for-Tat Strategy to Regulate the Cooperation in VANET Using QoS-OLSR Protocol

In this paper, we address the problem of cooperation among vehicles in VANET using QoS-OLSR protocol in the presence of selfish nodes. QoS-OLSR is a proactive protocol that considers the Quality of Service (QoS) of the nodes while electing the cluster-heads and selecting the Multi-Point Relay (MPRs) nodes. Cluster-heads and MPRs might misbehave on the roads by over-speeding or under-speeding. Classical and generous Tit-for-Tats are proposed to analyze the interaction among vehicles. However, both strategies are not able to enforce the cooperation due the fact that they (1) count on individual watchdogs monitoring, (2) rely on the node-to-node cooperation decision, (3) and ignore the high mobility and packet collisions. Therefore, we propose a Dempster-Shafer based Tit-for-Tat strategy that is able to improve the decision and regulate the cooperation in the vehicular network. This is done by (1) launching a cooperative watchdogs monitoring, (2) correlating the observations of the different watchdogs using Dempster-Shafer theory, and (3) propagating the decisions among clusters. Thereafter, we compare the Dempster-Shafer based strategy with several strategies derived from the original Tit-for-Tat. Simulation results prove that the Dempster-Shafer based strategy is able to maintain the survivability of the vehicular network in the presence of high mobility and packet collisions with minimal time and overhead.