MAC layer misbehavior in ad hoc networks

Significant research efforts have been made towards increasing the survivability of MANET either by developing secure routing algorithms or by improving the robustness of MAC layer protocol in the presence of selfish or compromised nodes. In addition, some recent studies have focused on quantifying the resiliency of MANET against MAC layer misbehaviors; however little work has been done on quantifying the impact of these misbehaviors on the performance of ad hoc routing protocols. In this paper we focus on the impacts of backoff manipulation attacks implemented by malicious nodes (MNs) on ad hoc routing; we show that a MN can disrupt all the flows in its vicinity and force the source nodes to restore communication by either discovering new routes or by making use of routing information cached at the node. We also show that a MN attracts more traffic to be routed through itself when it acts maliciously; this may potentially lead to draining the power of the MN if the network load is heavy. We use simulations to provide some numerical comparisons