Scenario based evaluation of the impact of misbehaving nodes in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is a collection of self organized mobile nodes that can communicate with each other without the need of pre-deployed infrastructure. Each mobile node acts as a router and forward packets for the other nodes in order to achieve the multi-hop communication between the nodes. A mobile node misbehave (selfish) due to its scarcely available resources and decide not to forward the packets on behalf of other nodes in the network but it expects other nodes to forward its own traffic. In this paper, the impact of such misbehaving nodes are analyzed and evaluated using Dynamic Source Routing as a routing protocol under different mobility scenario. The network performance is evaluated in terms of global throughput and normalized routing load where a defined percentage of nodes behave selfishly. The simulation study shows that the group mobility scenario performs better with the presence of selfish nodes than entity mobility scenario and the impact of selfishness is a major threat for MANETs.