Avoiding Misbehaving Nodes in Mobile Ad-Hoc Environments: Towards Improved QoS Routing

The recent advances in wireless technologies and ubiquitous computing have driven an immense interest in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). However, the performance of MANETs is highly affected by the behaviour of its constituting nodes, which must cooperate in order to provide the basic networking functionality. We present a solution that detects and avoids misbehaving nodes which agree to route packets for other nodes and subsequently drop these packets. Such misbehaviour is of direct effect on quality of service (QoS) solutions, namely the QoS good put metric. The solution takes a transparent layered approach and assumes no security constraints. The solution was simulated using NS2. Experiments were done using multiple variations of mobile ad hoc environments, according to the hostility degree, mobility scenario and traffic load. The experimentation results show that the solution consistently detects and avoids misbehaving nodes leading to improved goodput by up to 25%