Acknowledgment based Reputation Mechanism to Mitigate the Node Misbehavior in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Problem statement: The cooperation between the nodes is essential to discover and maintain routes in mobile ad hoc network. Due to the presence of misbehaving nodes, the node cooperation is not always guaranteed as the nodes agreed during the route discovery phase. This phenomenon results in frequent network partitioning and it makes the routing process difficult. It also degrades the overall network performance and increases the control overhead due to frequent route discovery. Approach: This study proposed an Acknowledgment based Reputation Mechanism (ARM) to detected and isolated the misbehaving links in mobile ad hoc networks. The proposed system introduced a novel dynamic acknowledgment ratio to make the nodes to request its second hop successor in the source route to acknowledge the receipt of the packet. This makes the nodes to detect the behavior of the next hop links and to select the trusted routes for its transmissions. Results: The measured parameters such as packet drop ratio, malicious drop, false detection and send buffer drop are reduced greatly. The results also compared with the existing scheme and with original routing protocol performance. Conclusion/Recommendations: The proposed scheme performs better in detecting and isolating the misbehaving links. The overall network packet drop was decreased which in turn increase the overall network throughput. This shows that the proposed acknowledgment scheme discovers the trusted routes with the presence of misbehaving nodes.