Behavioral Analysis of Selfish Node in WSN

Each node in Wireless Sensor Networks can communicate directly with other nodes in its radio communication range. If the destination node is not within the transmission range of the source node, the source node takes help of the intermediate nodes to communicate with the destination node by relaying the messages hop by hop. Hence the mutual cooperation and contribution of packet forwarding among the nodes in the network is needed. However, since the sensor nodes in this network are constrained with limited resources, such as CPU, battery, channel bandwidth and etc, some nodes in the network might not be willing to cooperate for the packet transmission, in order to save their resources. Each node has the goal to maximize its own benefits by enjoying network services and at the same time minimizing its contribution, so nodes may tend to be selfish. A selfish node does not intend to directly damage othernodes, but is unwilling to spend battery life, CPU cycles, or available network bandwidth to forward packets not of direct interest to it, even though it expects others to forward packets on its behalf. Consequently, cooperative behavior, such as unconditionally forwarding packets for others, cannot be taken for granted. The selfish behavior can significantly damage network performance.