Trust Based Intrusion Detection Technique to Detect Selfish Nodes in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The applications and protocols conceived for mobile ad hoc networks rely on the assumption of cooperation amongst the mobile nodes because of lacking infrastructure. All nodes have to spend their precious resources (e.g. battery power, memory, computational power, and network bandwidth) for routing and packet forwarding operations for other nodes, in a cooperative way in the network. However, there are some nodes that may intentionally turn themselves to behave selfishly in order to conserve their valuable resources. The selfish behaviour of such nodes drastically reduces the desired degree of cooperation amongst the mobile nodes. Over the course of time, the non-cooperative activities of, such selfish nodes would paralyze the normal functioning of the whole network. Therefore, these types of nodes should be detected and isolated from the network, as soon as they begin to exhibit their selfish behaviour. In this paper, a dynamic trust based intrusion detection technique is presented to detect and isolate the selfish nodes from the network, where the direct trust degree based on direct communication interactions and indirect (recommended) trust degree based on the neighbours’ recommendations are taking into account to accurately judge the selfishness nature of the nodes. The results obtained throughout the simulation experiments clearly show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed intrusion detection technique.