Conviction Scheme for Classifying Misbehaving Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a wireless network, self-configuring, capable of self-directed operation, hastily deployable and operates without infrastructure. Nodes cooperate to provide connectivity, operates without centralized administration. Nodes are itinerant, topology can be very dynamic and nodes must be able to relay traffic since communicating nodes might be out of range. The dynamic nature of MANET makes network open to attacks and unreliability. A node may be unsuccessful to cooperate during routing, sometimes may even disturb the routing transaction. The Qos parameters like PDR, throughput and delay are affected directly due to such behavior of nodes and it is termed as misbehaving nodes. A trust-based system can be used to track this misbehaving of nodes, spot them and isolate them from routing and provide reliability. In this paper a trust based reliable AODV protocol is presented which implements a trust value for each node. Every node is defined as reliable node if its trust value is greater than threshold value, if not it’s a misbehaving node. This enhances reliability in AODV routing and results in increase of PDR, decrease in delay and throughput is maintained. This work is implemented and simulated on NS-2. Based on simulation results, the proposed protocol provides more consistent and reliable data transfer compared with normal AODV, if there are misbehaving nodes in the MANET.