Analysing credit based ARAN to detect selfish nodes in MANET

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is collection of self configuring, wireless, multi hop mobile nodes. This network lacks centralized routing capability as well as a fixed network infrastructure and topology. In order to communicate with each other these multi hop nodes themselves act as routers. As the nodes are mobile and due to lack of central server, the routing may become erroneous. Also due to dynamic nature of nodes the routing becomes a highly tedious task. In the literature several routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks and most prominent among them are DSR, AODV and TORA. But almost all of these protocols assume that the nodes in the MANET are always cooperative. However, these protocols protect MANET from all the possible attacks except non cooperative behavior. ARAN (Authenticated Routing for Adhoc Networks) is a solution proposed which provides security against all possible vulnerabilities but an authenticated selfish node can manipulate these protocols and can disturb the network by dropping packets or delaying the packet. These noncooperative nodes may in turn partition the network. In this paper we propose a credit based system that can be applied to routing protocol to detect selfish node and improve the network performance.