# Quantitative Study on the Impact of Energy Consumption Based Dynamic Selfishness in MANETs +
## 8 Conclusions and Future Work  
The selfishness caused by limited energy brings harmful impacts on the network performance of MANETs, which highly depend on cooperative communications. Understanding the impacts of the selfish nodes in MANETs paves the road to the selfish nodes detection and incentive mechanisms that could improve the overall network performance.  
In this study, the impacts of energy consumption based dynamic selfish nodes in MANETs are quantitatively analyzed based on extensive computer simulations. The results of our experiments suggest that there are significant impacts of selfish nodes in MANETs in terms of packet loss rate, round-trip delay, and throughput, no matter what kind of selfishness. Our quantitative analysis concluded that selfish node proportion and mobility have more significant impacts on the network performance in MANETs in terms of the metrics. The impact of dynamic selfish node densities is not as serious as static ones. The selfish node combinations in MANETs indirectly reflect the impacts of the mobility model and selfish node density. In general, the more selfish nodes involved in the network, the worse network performance is in MANETs. However, in an extremely dense network, the routing protocol deals with much more discovery and maintenance tasks, which lead tolonger round-trip delays between the sender and the receiver. Static selfish nodes bring more harmful effects to the network than dynamic ones because more packets are dropped by the static selfish nodes. However, dynamic selfishness based on energy consumption is more close to the reality than static selfishness. It is crucial to accurately evaluate the impact of node selfishness so that it provides a base to develop effective detection and incentive mechanisms.  
By all counts, and with proven results, it is no wonder that the four characteristics, namely mobility, density, proportion, and combination, of selfish nodes affect the network performance to different degrees. The joint consideration of these characteristics of selfish nodes in MANETs will open more interesting research topics, e.g., wireless routing algorithms, mobile nodes cluster head selections, mobile edge computing-based data offloading, and so forth.  
Based on this work, to design a more accurate and fairer selfish node detection mechanism in MANETs is our nearest research plan. Furthermore, a more effective selfish node incentive mechanism that could fully utilize the network resources in MANETs is our final research goal.  
Conceptualization, A.S., X.F. and C.W.; methodology, A.S. and C.W.; software, A.S. and C.W.; formal analysis, X.Z.; investigation, A.S. and X.Z; data creation, A.S., S.F. and X.Z.; writing--original draft preparation, A.S. and S.F.; writing--review and editing, X.F. and X.Z.; visualization, A.S. and X.Z; supervision, X.F.; project administration, X.F.; funding acquisition, X.F. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research was funded by Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61272509), Shaanxi Province Hundred Talents Program, and the key research and development plan of Shaanxi province (2017 ZDCXL-GY-05-01).  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.