A distributed cooperative approach to improve detection and removal of misbehaving MANET nodes

In a MANET, nodes provide a cooperative multi-hop forwarding functionality, so no specialized devices are required for routing packets. In such self-organized networks, forwarding packets for other nodes is not in the direct interest of any node, because nodes have to spend battery life, CPU cycles, and use the available network bandwidth to forward packets. So a node may refuse to forward packets for others to save its resources, while itself using their resources and asking them to forward its own packets. This deviation from the correct behavior represents a potential threat against the availability of service, as well as the network performance. Many solutions have been recently proposed for the misbehavior nodes threat, but these suffer from many problems like false detection due to ambiguity and receiver collision, power controlled misbehavior and cooperative misbehavior. In this paper we propose a new approach that addresses above problems by providing a distributed cooperative system, in which every node participates in identifying the misbehaving node. Every node exchanges its monitored information both cooperative as well as non-cooperative. This information then helps the routing protocol to avoid misbehaving nodes. This approach also gives chance of node's reintroduction into the network, so in case of false detection also a node can re-enter into the network. We present a performance analysis of MANET with the proposed approach and compare it to normal MANET as well as MANET with misbehaving nodes and no solutions. C++ has been used to implement the proposed approach in the AODV routing protocol in a MANET and testing has been done by simulation on the OMNET++ network simulator.