Democratic detection of malicious behaviour in MANET: A voting process

Wireless MANET presents new security problems in comparison to the conventional wired and wireless networks, as it is more vulnerable to malicious attacks due to its unique features. The MANET routing protocols require that the mobile nodes that form such temporal network cooperate with each other to achieve the desired routing purpose for the exchange of information amongst the participating nodes. However, the cooperation cannot be realised where network nodes exhibit malicious operations. The MANET characteristics and applications make it difficult to have a centralised security management entity. Furthermore, the implementation of Power- Aware routing protocols complicates the possibility of relying entirely on watchdog mechanisms to safeguard the network against Black-Hole attack. In addition, the watchdog's eavesdropping operation violates the TCP protocol rules, and requires buffering of large amount of packets during the monitoring process, which results to extra overheads. This paper proposes an algorithm which utilises Cluster-Heads and votes from neighbourhood nodes to detect and eliminate malicious nodes. It addresses challenges posed by Power-Aware routing protocols and watchdog approaches in detecting Black-Hole attack, thereby increasing nodes' availability and the overall network performance.