Evaluation of the Impact of Selfish Nodes in Ad Hoc Networks and Detection and Countermeasure Methods

Various portable electronic devices now have wireless interfaces as standard equipment. Such interfaces will be common in ad hoc networks, relaying packets mutually among users´ nodes in a network without base stations. However, a fear is emerging of selfish nodes in ad hoc networks. These nodes take advantage of other ones and do not cooperate with others, making network resources unavailable for legitimate nodes. This problem is categorized as a security issue. Our research demonstrates the impact of these selfish nodes. The authors have studied the problem of selfish nodes and tested primitive detection and countermeasure methods by network simulation.