An acknowledgment-based approach for the detection of routing misbehavior in MANETs

We study routing misbehavior in MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks) in this paper. In general, routing protocols for MANETs are designed based on the assumption that all participating nodes are fully cooperative. However, due to the open structure and scarcely available battery-based energy, node misbehaviors may exist. One such routing misbehavior is that some selfish nodes will participate in the route discovery and maintenance processes but refuse to forward data packets. In this paper, we propose the 2ACK scheme that serves as an add-on technique for routing schemes to detect routing misbehavior and to mitigate their adverse effect. The main idea of the 2ACK scheme is to send two-hop acknowledgment packets in the opposite direction of the routing path. In order to reduce additional routing overhead, only a fraction of the received data packets are acknowledged in the 2ACK scheme. Analytical and simulation results are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.