Abstract
Packet dropping in a mobile ad hoc network can manifest itself as the data plane attacks as well as control plane attacks. The former deal with malicious nodes performing packet drop on the data packets following the route formation and the latter deal with those malicious nodes which either drop or manipulate the control packets to degrade the network performance. The idea of the proposed approach is that during the route establishment, each of the on-path nodes is provided with pre-computed hash values which have to be used to provide a unique acknowledgement value to the upstream neighbor which acts as a proof of the forwarding activity. The analysis phase results in the detection of nodes which exhibited malicious behavior in the current communication session so as to avoid them in the future communication sessions resulting in an improved packet delivery fraction even in the presence of one or more malicious nodes in the network. The communication overhead incurred is minimum since the acknowledgement reports are sent to the destination for a transmission of N packets rather than an individual acknowledgement for each transmitted packet. In contrast to some of the existing techniques, the proposed mechanism is not dependent on the deployment of additional infrastructure like special Intrusion Detection System (IDS) nodes. The only overhead incurred is in the form of control packets exchanged for the reports request and the reports submission.