A Novel Leader based Reputation Approach for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc networks perform well only when nodes in the network cooperate in routing and packet forwarding. As these networks are lack of security aspects, selfish and malicious nodes become a part of that network resulting in performance degradation. This paper suggests a leader based reputation system for identifying routing misbehavior. The reputation system is constructed using trust value and decision made in routing that are based on past experience, observations and/ or informed behavior of other nodes. Trust value is evaluated using trust resilient algorithm and it is based on two important parameters namely, efficacy factor and feedback reliability. A node with high battery life and high trust value is elected as a leader. The member nodes report the reputation value and feedback to the leader. The leader node maintains a reputation and feedback records of all its member nodes. The reputation value is an integer value and feedback is just a phrase conveying the satisfaction level of performance of a node. A node with continuous negative feedback is treated as a malicious node and isolated from the network. Feedback is aggregated using modified periodic per hop adaptive aggregation techniques. This proposal detects a malicious node effectively and avoids false reporting as it considers only feedback from the highly reputed node. We perform an overall analysis of our paper by simulation using the network simulator (NS2). The experimental results clearly indicate the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed system in eliminating misbehaving nodes.