Random Dummy Packet Distribution Approach for Detection of Routing Misbehavior in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) works on the assumption that mobile nodes are cooperative. On the other hand, in practical, it may not be possible due to selfish, malicious and misbehaving nodes present in the network. These nodes are capable of interrupting the communication process and there is a potential for serious performance degradation. To improve the performance of the network, detection and elimination of node misbehavior is paramount. This study presents a new technique called Random Dummy packet Distribution (RDD) approach that can be used as an extension scheme in Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol to recognize and exclude misbehaving nodes. The key objective of RDD approach is mobile nodes generate dummy packets randomly and forward to the destination node. It receives the acknowledgement only if there is no misbehaving node available in its root path. If it found any critical path, a trust factor evaluation used to prove its misbehavior. Finally, Information about node misbehavior has shared with all other participants in the network. To reduce the network traffic and routing overhead, RDD uses the random dummy packets for routing acknowledgement. The results obtained from simulation proved that, the RDD approach can lessen the impact of misbehaving nodes and hence, improve the performance of routing protocol. RDD is an add-on method for routing protocol in order to eliminate the misbehaving nodes and the performance analysis proves the effectiveness of RDD approach over other schemes.