Beyond watchdog schemes in securing MANET's reactive protocols operating on a dynamic transmission power control technique

Communication is no longer restricted to areas with telecommunication network infrastructure due to the introduction of wireless mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) that makes it possible to communicate anytime anywhere, without the support of a pre-existing network infrastructure. Unfortunately, MANET comes with unique features which are neither common to the conventional wired networks nor the cellular wireless networks, hence it presents new security challenges due to malicious attacks vulnerabilities. The operation of MANET routing protocols require that participating nodes cooperate in order to achieve the desired efficiency in information exchange in such a temporal network. The portability and size of MANET devices limit the battery power, and this has led to the implementations of various transmission power-aware schemes in the traditional MANET reactive routing protocols to prolong the network's lifetime. The introduction of the power-aware schemes makes it unreliable to solely depend on the watchdog security mechanisms to secure MANETs against black-hole attacks. This paper presents a framework which overcomes the watchdog schemes weakness in the presence of power-aware routing protocols to accurately detect and eliminate black-hole nodes, thereby improving the network performance.