Collaboration enforcement and adaptive data redirection In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks using only firsthand experience

Abstract

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), all participating hosts are obligated to route and forward data for others to guarantee the availability of network applications and services. Most of the contemporary collaboration enforcement techniques employ reputation mechanisms for nodes to avoid and penalize malicious participants. Reputation information is updated based on complicated trust relationships among hosts and other techniques to thwart false accusation of benign nodes. The aforementioned strategy suffers from low scalability and is likely to be exploited by adversaries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the aforementioned problems. With the proposed technique, no reputation information is propagated in the network and malicious nodes cannot cause false penalty to benign hosts. Misbehaving nodes are penalized and circumvented by benign nodes within their localities based on first-hand experiences. This approach significantly simplifies the collaboration enforcement process, incurs very low overhead, and is robust against various evasive behaviors. Simulations based on various system configurations demonstrate that overall network performance is greatly enhanced. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.