Detecting misbehaving nodes in MANETs

Abstract

There has been a tremendous growth in the use of wireless communication in the past few decades. Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is one of the most important one among various wireless communication mechanisms. In MANET, each node in a network performs as both a transmitter and a receiver. They rely on each other to store and forward packets. Its unique infrastructureless network and self-configuring capability makes it ideal for many mission critical applications, including military use and remote exploration. However, these characteristics also make MANET vulnerable to passive and active attacks due to its open medium, changing topology and lack of centralized monitoring. To address the new security challenges, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is required to detect the malicious attackers before they can accomplish any significant damages to the network. Many existing IDSs for MANETs are based upon Watchdog mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new IDS called Enhanced Adaptive ACKnowledgement (EAACK) that solves four significant problems of Watchdog mechanism, which are ambiguous collisions, receiver collisions, limited transmission power and false misbehavior report. We use Network Simulator 2 to simulate the proposed mechanism and compare the results with existing mechanisms.