New approach for selfish nodes detection in mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a temporary infrastructureless network, formed by a set of mobile hosts that dynamically establish their own network on the fly without relying on any central administration. Mobile hosts used in MANET have to ensure the services that were ensured by the powerful fixed infrastructure in traditional networks, the packet forwarding is one of these services. The resource limitation of nodes used in MANET, particularly in energy supply, along with the multi-hop nature of this network may cause new phenomena which do not exist in traditional networks. To save its energy a node may behave selfishly and uses the forwarding service of other nodes without correctly forwarding packets for them. This deviation from the correct behavior represents a potential threat against the quality of service (QoS), as well as the service availability, one of the most important security requirements. Some solutions have been recently proposed, but almost all these solutions rely on the watchdog technique as stated in S. Marti et al. (2000) in their monitoring components, which suffers from many problems. In this paper we propose an approach to mitigate some of these problems, and we assess its performance by simulation.