Assessing discreet packet-dropping attacks using nearest-neighbor and path-vector attribution

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is considered with nodes that may act selfishly or maliciously by simply dropping data packets rather than forwarding them. We study a distributed route assessment (reputation) system for a MANET context in which nodes attribute a route’s performance to their nearest neighbors on the route. Also, attribution to all relaying nodes is studied for the case where path vectors are available, and blame for dropped packets is assigned to each node on the path. For the situation where there is sufficient mobility (“mixing”) within the domain, we show that these reputations converge to reveal the true relative dropping rates of the individual nodes. These results may be applicable to a more general category of peer-to-peer networks with sufficient route diversity.