Secure detection mechanism against selfishness in MANETs

Cost effective, ease to install, no infrastructure requirement etc. are some attractive features that contribute to wide use of MANETs these days. These networks are considered self organized networks and require participation of each node on equal basis to perform various network operations. Limited resources could cause the unwillingness of any node to spare its resources for other nodes. This behavior is widely known as 'selfishness'. We have proposed a secure lightweight detection and isolation mechanism to contain the data packet loss caused by the selfish nodes. Unlike existing mitigation schemes, our scheme can work well even in an adversary environment. This paper considered two types of packet dropping due to selfishness. Simulation analysis proved that EHA mechanism enhanced overall network performance and reduced packet dropping even in the presence of 40% selfish nodes. Unlike other solutions, EHA mechanism create an affordable overhead which is either created by each hop acknowledgement or the additional information that each route request (RREQ) need to carry which help any node to form perception about other nodes. Based on local assessment, a large number of RREQs were concluded malicious and thus the accused nodes were isolated to prevent more packet loss.