A Hybrid Stimulation Approach for Coping Against the Malevolence and Selfishness in Mobile Ad hoc Network

Abstract

The features of Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) such limited-resources and network openness, make MANET vulnerable to malicious nodes aiming to disrupt network activities and selfish nodes aiming to preserve their resources by refusing to relay packets for other nodes. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid acknowledgment approach called NHACK. The purpose of NHACK is to identify and punish malicious nodes, and to stimulate selfish nodes to cooperate in the route discovery process. Based on the acknowledgment monitoring technique, we propose a new reputation computation method to assess the reliability of each node with a single reputation value. Our approach uses the computed reputation values to penalize nodes having low reputation values while at the same time to select reliable forwarding paths that involve reliable nodes. Thus, to stimulate selfish nodes to cooperate, the contribution that each node provides in the route discovery process is used as incentive. We analyze the effectiveness of our approach through mathematical model and via simulation. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed approach can punish malicious and selfish nodes which improves the throughput and reduces the malicious drop ratio, while reducing the success rate of selfish nodes.