Hardware assisted misbehaving nodes detection in mobile ad hoc networks

The mobility feature leads to the proliferation of wireless networks. Among all kinds of wireless networks, the peer-to-peer nature of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) makes such networks very promising. Unlike traditional wired networks, MANETs do not need infrastructure to work properly. The most commonly used routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks do not take into consideration security, assuming all the mobile nodes will coordinate with each other. Such routing protocols along with the absence of infrastructure make MANETs prone to a variety of faults such as packet dropping, packet misrouting, etc. This dissertation addresses the security issues of MANET by presenting the hardware assisted misbehaving nodes detection. In such a scheme, the hardware is responsible for detecting the misbehaving nodes. The detection results are sent to software layer of mobile nodes. Upon receiving the detection results, the software layer can exclude the misbehaving nodes from the networks. This dissertation presents two hardware detection schemes. Two-timer is a low-cost detection scheme. There are only two timers utilized in the scheme. The two-timer scheme can be used to detect simple packet dropping with good detection performance. The other detection scheme, cache scheme, can detect both packet dropping and packet misrouting. The cache scheme needs more resource than the two-timer scheme along with better detection performance.