One of the challenging concepts in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is cooperation maintenance. It is important to know when and how long to do the cooperation among nodes. In this paper we introduce a new concept called “Cooperation Tuning”. A distributed system based on a fuzzy inference system (FIS) with two inputs “cooperativeness” and “assertiveness” and an output “conflict” is proposed. Considering a degree of conflict, each node decides whether to send a packet or save its energy. We classify nodes’ behaviors into five types: Collaborating, Competing, Compromising, Avoiding and Accommodating. Results show that conflict is a good “Cooperation Tuning” tool and some degrees of conflict have a good influence on network throughput and decreasing selfishness among nodes. We compare our work with the stateof- the-art incentive cooperation models like DECADE.

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