Preventing Natural and Malicious Network Partition in Ad Hoc Networks Using Cooperative Healing Cell

Continuous mobility of nodes makes ad hoc networks vulnerable to be partitioned. Many partition prevention approaches are only based on link availability while ignoring that nodes mostly move in a group pattern in practical environment. Adversaries may decrease network performance through deliberately launching partition, which is seldom considered as a type of attack in conventional intrusion detection systems and secure routing protocols. To prevent both natural and malicious network partition caused by group mobility, we present a novel route maintaining mechanism based on cooperative healing cell, which is composed by cooperative groups of nodes. The basic unit for route maintenance is node group not a single node. Our design employs a preemptive partition avoidance policy which can launch route maintenance before actual partition. The simulation shows that cooperative healing cell not only increases the precision in partition prediction but also provides an effective cooperation enhancement against the partition caused by malicious node groups.