A bio-inspired scheme on quorum systems for reliable services data management in MANETs

Network services in MANETs, such as resource location and distribution of connectivity information, deal with node mobility and resource constraints to support applications. The reliability and availability of these services can be assured by data management approaches, as replication techniques using quorum systems. However, these systems are vulnerable to selfish and malicious nodes, that intentionally do not collaborate with replication operations or spread malicious data while participating in data replication. In order to handle these issues, this paper proposes QS², a bio-inspired scheme to tolerate selfish and malicious nodes in replication operation of quorum systems. Differently from existing works on the literature, QS² is distributed and self-organized, and each node has the autonomy to exclude misbehaving nodes. The scheme is inspired by quorum sensing and kin selection, both biological mechanisms resident in bacteria. Simulation results show that QS² improves significantly the reliability of a quorum system for MANETs, detecting more than 80% of misbehaving nodes on replication operations.