Reputation-based mechanisms to avoid misbehaving nodes in ad hoc and wireless sensor networks

Securing mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) has been the interest of researchers recently because of its use in important security sectors such as police, rescue teams, and the military. One method to ensure a secure ad hoc network is to identify malicious nodes (hostile) from good nodes by their reputation based on the past experience of packet delivery. In this paper, we explore by applying reputation in various ways the effect to the throughput of a MANET ad hoc network. We simulate four different scenarios where the node reputation is evaluated to choose the most reliable route and eliminate the effect of malicious nodes performing gray-hole attack. One of the applied scenarios is a hybrid method where a sender node takes in consideration the reputation of all the nodes forming a route to choose the most reliable route. We find that by applying the hybrid method the performance of the network is the best and data packets are more likely to be delivered successfully to the intended destination in a very hostile environment.