Detection of packet forwarding misbehavior in mobile ad-hoc networks

Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) are susceptible to having their effective operation compromised by a variety of security attacks. Nodes may misbehave either because they are malicious and deliberately wish to disrupt the network, or because they are selfish and wish to conserve their own limited resources such as power, or for other reasons. In this paper, we present a mechanism that enables the detection of nodes that exhibit packet forwarding misbehavior. We present evaluation results that demonstrate the operation of our algorithm in mobile ad hoc environments and show that it effectively detects nodes that drop a significant fraction of packets.