Effect of on/off misbehavior on overhearing based cooperation scheme for MANET

Misbehaving nodes, including malicious and selfish ones, will disturb the cooperation among all wireless nodes in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Overhearing and reputation based cooperation schemes have been used to detect and isolate the misbehaving nodes as well as to force them to cooperate. These schemes worked well in previous publications. However, in this paper, we propose an on/off misbehaving strategy that will fool the current overhearing reputation schemes and downgrade the performance of network. All the simulation results are based on the OCEAN protocol which works with a non-secondhand reputation system. We also analyze how parameters of the on/off strategy would affect the result.