TEEM: Trust-based Energy-Efficient Distributed Monitoring for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Detecting malicious and selfish nodes in mobile and wireless networks is a task that typically relies on watchdog techniques. However, such medium overhearing techniques are prone to cause a high energy consumption. In this paper we propose a distributed time division-based monitoring strategy to achieve the high security levels required while consuming less energy. Our proposal involves both trust and link duration among honest peers to fairly divide the monitoring period, and takes advantage of the periodically exchanged hello messages to make this solution fully distributed. Simulations results evidence our proposal energy efficiency, especially for high density scenarios (>100 nodes) where the consumption became stable and does not increase with the number of nodes (<4300 W·s), while ensuring high detection ratios of malicious nodes (>90%).