Detection of Packet Dropping Nodes in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a wireless ad hoc network which uses mesh topology to connect the radio nodes together and it is prone to vulnerabilities due to its open architecture. Packet loss is the major issue due to its open wireless physical media, frequent topological changes, scalability and power constraints. In general, packet drops in WMN during transmission may happen due to mobility or buffer overflow or power depletion or malicious behavior of the intermediate nodes which degrades the performance of WMN. This paper proposes an adaptive dynamic source routing protocol (ADSR) to detect the misbehaving node using the cross-layer approach that performs packet dropping and reroute the packets using the alternate paths. These packet drops are identified precisely in this work, which significantly reduces false positive rate of detection of malicious nodes. The performance of ADSR is analyzed using a mathematical model by considering the characteristics of a node’s behavior. Using extensive simulations, the performances are thoroughly analyzed and evaluated and compared with traditional dynamic source routing (DSR), Watchdog (WD), Bait-DSR (BDSR) protocols. Simulation results show that with negligible increase in overhead, this protocol provides secured routes with an increased packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput.