An approach to mitigate DoS attack based on routing misbehavior in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract

The routing misbehavior is one of the most serious threats to wireless ad hoc networks where nodes are not forwarding messages correctly. Once the attack has been launched, nodes in the network are not able to send messages anymore. Thus it could be a kind of DoS (denial of service) attack. So far, in order to detect the attack, most researches employ a watchdog method although it is not efficient and has a high false positive ratio. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to detect the attacks based on routing misbehavior. It can detect attacks in a more effective way as well as solve problems in existing watchdog. In the proposed method a node in the network cooperates with its neighbor nodes to collect statistics on packets. According to the statistical information, the method determines each nodes misbehavior. The simulation results shows that the proposed method is practical and effective to apply to real domain.