A reputation-based scheme against malicious packet dropping for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) operates much depending on node's willingness to cooperate in the network. A node's misbehavior can have severe impact in overall network performance. One of the different kinds of misbehavior a node may exhibit is malicious packet dropping. In this paper, we focus on detecting and excluding nodes that misbehave by dropping some or all packets forwarded through them. We propose a reputation-based scheme for efficiently solving the problem. The proposed scheme use both self-observation and second-hand information to establish comprehensive reputation of a node. Nodes with bad comprehensive reputation will be excluded from the network. History reputation is also taken into account to providing indeliberate faults tolerance. Furthermore, we use fuzzy analysis to deal with the imprecision based on the fact that the cause of packet dropping can be heterogeneous and therefore improve the performance without imposing a high computational burden.