Nodes bearing grudges: towards routing security, fairness, and robustness in mobile ad hoc networks

Devices in mobile ad hoc networks work as network nodes and relay packets originated by other nodes. Mobile ad hoc networks can work properly only if the participating nodes cooperate in routing and forwarding. For individual nodes it might be advantageous not to cooperate. The new routing protocol extensions presented in this paper make it possible to detect and isolate misbehaving nodes, thus making denying cooperation undesirable. In the presented scheme, trust relationships and routing decisions are made based on experienced, observed, or reported routing and forwarding behavior of other nodes. A hybrid scheme of selective altruism and utilitarianism is presented to strengthen mobile ad hoc network protocols in their resistance to security attacks, while aiming at keeping network throughput high. This paper focuses particularly on the network layer using the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol as an example.