An efficient approach for the detection of node misbehaviour in a MANET based on link misbehaviour

Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs) are susceptible to having their effective operation compromised by a variety of security attacks because of the features like unreliability of wireless links between nodes, constantly changing topology, restricted battery power, lack of centralized control and others. Nodes may misbehave either because they are malicious and deliberately wish to disrupt the network, or because they are selfish and wish to conserve their own limited resources such as power. In this paper, we present a mechanism that enables the detection of nodes that exhibit packet forwarding misbehavior. The approach is based on the usage of two techniques which will be used in parallel in such a way that the results generated by one of them are further processed by the other to finally generate the list of misbehaving nodes. The first part detects the misbehaving links using the 2ACK technique and this information is fed into the second part which uses the principle of conservation of flow (PFC) technique to detect the misbehaving node. The problem with the 2ACK algorithm is that it can detect the misbehaving link but cannot decide upon which one of the nodes associated with that link are misbehaving. Hence we use the principle of conservation of flow, PFC for the second part which detects the misbehaving nodes associated with that of the misbehaving link.