An Integrated Stimulation and Punishment Mechanism for Thwarting Packet Dropping Attack in Multihop Wireless Networks

In multihop wireless networks, the rational packet droppers may not relay the others´ packets because packet relay consumes their resources without benefits, and the irrational packet droppers intentionally drop packets to disrupt the packet transmission process, which may make multihop communication fail. Cooperation stimulation mechanisms can motivate the rational packet droppers to relay packets, but they cannot identify the irrational packet droppers. In this paper, we develop a novel mechanism that can thwart the rational and irrational packet dropping attacks by adopting stimulation and punishment strategies (TRIPO). TRIPO uses micropayment to stimulate the rational packet droppers to relay the others´ packets and enforce fairness and uses reputation system (RS) to identify and evict the irrational packet droppers. We propose a novel monitoring technique to measure the nodes´ frequency of dropping packets based on processing the payment receipts instead of using the medium overhearing technique. The receipts can be processed to extract financial information to reward the cooperative nodes that relay packets, as well as contextual information, such as broken links, to build up the RS. Extensive analytical and simulation results demonstrate that TRIPO can secure the payment and precisely identify the irrational packet droppers with almost no false-positive nodes, which can improve the network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio.