Detecting Packet Mishandling in MANETs

Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are inherently prone to security attacks, with node mobility being the primary cause in allowing security breaches. This makes the network susceptible to Byzantyne faults with packets getting misrouted or dropped. This paper proposes solutions using an unobtrusive monitoring technique to locate malicious or faulty nodes that misroute or drop packets. This technique uses information from different network layers to detect malicious nodes. Any single node can use unobtrusive monitoring without relying on the cooperation of other nodes, making this technique easy to implement and deploy. Simulations of MANETs containing malicious nodes indicate that this technique has a high detection effectiveness with low false positive rate.