An Algorithm to Detect Packet Forwarding Misbehavior in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Devices in a Mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) may misbehave by dropping packets that are forwarded in the network, for example because they are malicious and deliberately intend to disrupt the network, or because they are selfish and wish to conserve their own limited resources such as power. In this paper, we present a mechanism that enables the detection of nodes that exhibit packet forwarding misbehavior. We present initial evaluation results that demonstrate the operation of our algorithm and show that it effectively detects nodes that drop a significant fraction of packets.