Counteracting Selfish Nodes Using Reputation Based System in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a group of nodes constituting a network of mobile nodes without predefined and pre-established architecture where mobile nodes can communicate without any dedicated access points or base stations. In MANETs, a node may act as a host as well as a router. Nodes in the network can send and receive packets through intermediate nodes. However, the existence of malicious and selfish nodes in MANETs severely degrades network performance. The identification of such nodes in the network and their isolation from the network is a challenging problem. Therefore, in this paper, a simple reputation-based scheme is proposed which uses the consumption and contribution information for selfish node detection and cooperation enforcement. Nodes failing to cooperate are detached from the network to save resources of other nodes with good reputation. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the benchmark scheme in terms of NRL (normalized routing load), PDF (packet delivery fraction), and packet drop in the presence of malicious and selfish attacks. Furthermore, our scheme identifies the selfish nodes quickly and accurately as compared to the benchmark scheme.

Automated summary

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a network without predefined architecture, where nodes can communicate freely. However, malicious and selfish nodes can severely degrade network performance. This study proposes a reputation-based scheme to detect selfish nodes and enforce cooperation, improving network performance.