Efficient Monitoring Mechanisms for Cooperative Storage in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks: Detection Time and Accuracy Tradeoffs

Distributed cooperative storage systems are designed to share the storage resources of network nodes for the common good of everyone, especially in dynamic ad hoc networks (MANETs) where the risk of data loss is high. In ad hoc networks, as mobile nodes operate on low-power battery and use limited storage capacity, data holders might behave selfishly by discarding some data they promised to store for other nodes in order to optimize their storage space for their own usage. To detect such a behavior, a monitoring mechanism, which checks whether a data is still held by the data holder, must be used. In this paper, we propose novel monitoring mechanisms that consider MANETs constraints and overcome the limitations of the existing monitors. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can offer a good trade-off between the rate of false positives and the time to detect misbehaved nodes.