An Artificial Immune System Approach to Misbehavior Detection in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad-hoc networks, nodes act both as terminals and information relays, and participate in a common routing protocol, such as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). The network is vulnerable to routing misbehavior, due to faulty or malicious nodes. Misbehavior detection systems aim at removing this vulnerability. In this paper we investigate the use of an Artificial Immune System (AIS) to detect node misbehavior in a mobile ad-hoc network using DSR. The system is inspired by the natural immune system of vertebrates. Our goal is to build a system that, like its natural counterpart, automatically learns and detects new misbehavior. We describe the first step of our design; it employs negative selection, an algorithm used by the natural immune system. We define how we map the natural immune system concepts such as self, antigen and antibody to a mobile ad-hoc network, and give the resulting algorithm for misbehavior detection. We implemented the system in the network simulator Glomosim; we present detection results and discuss how the system parameters impact the results. Further steps will extend the design by using an analogy to the innate system, danger signals, costimulation and memory cells.