Detection and Prevention of Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks using Reputation-based Incentive Schemes

Mieso, K Denko

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are dynamic mobile networks that can be formed in the absence of any pre-existing communication infrastructure. In addition to node mobility, a MANET is characterized by limited resources such as bandwidth, battery power, and storage space. The underlying assumption in MANETs is that the intermediate nodes cooperate in forwarding packets. However, this assumption does not hold in commercial and emerging civilian applications. MANETs are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) due to their salient characteristics. There is a need to provide an incentive mechanism that can provide cooperation among nodes in the network and improve overall network performance by reducing DoS attacks. In this paper, we propose a reputation-based incentive mechanism for detecting and preventing DoS attacks. DoS attacks committed by selfish and malicious nodes were investigated. Our scheme motivates nodes to cooperate and excludes them from the network only if they fail to do so. We evaluated the performance of our scheme using the packet delivery ratio, the routing and communication overhead, and misbehaving node detection in a discrete event-simulation environment. The results indicate that a reputation-based incentive mechanism can significantly reduce the effect of DoS attacks and improve performance in MANETs.

Full Text