Wireless ad-hoc networks : employing behaviour history to combat malicious nodes

The presence of malicious nodes in Ad-hoc networks, which operate without a central administration infrastructure, can result in performance degradation or even disruption of the network operation. This paper investigates this topic further and proposes some approaches to mitigate the consequences of the presence of the malicious nodes in Ad-hoc networks. Experimental and simulation results that show the effect of such nodes on the performance of the network are reported and analyzed. To achieve higher levels of security and reliability, an approach that is based on the utilization of past behaviour of all member nodes is investigated and reported. The main goal for this approach is to identify routes between the source and the destination, which excludes and if not possible, minimizes the number of malicious node in the routes. The advantages of this approach are also compared with the traditional approaches that tend to use other criteria such as shortest path alone. Using OPNET simulator, the proposed approach is validated and further studied. The findings show that when the proposed approach is utilized, the overall performance of the Ad-hoc network is significantly improved.