Preventing Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in mobile ad hoc networks

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks aim at degrading the network performance by preventing legitimate users from accessing or using the services. Although these attacks are still prevalent in the Internet, mobile ad hoe networks (MANETs) are more vulnerable to such attacks due to their salient characteristics. These attacks overload networks or servers by reducing the bandwidth, computing and storage space. Incentive mechanisms can provide cooperation among nodes in the network and improve the overall network throughput by reducing the DoS attacks. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based incentive mechanism for preventing DoS attacks that target both the network and application layer services, The DoS attacks due to selfish and malicious nodes were investigated. We evaluated the performance of our scheme using simulation experiments. The results indicated that reputation-based incentives can significantly reduce the effect of the DoS attacks in non-cooperating ad hoc networks.