Lightweight acknowledgement-based method to detect misbehavior in MANETs

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are the best choice when mobility, scalability, and decentralized network infrastructure are needed. Because of critical mission applications of MANETs, network security is the vital requirement. Most routing protocols in MANETs assume that every node in the network is trustworthy. However, due to the open medium, the wide distribution, and the lack of nodes’ physical protection, attackers can easily compromise MANETs by inserting misbehaving nodes into the network that make blackhole attacks. Previous research to detect the misbehaving nodes in MANETs used the overhearing methods, or additional ACKnowledgement (ACK) packets to confirm the reception of data packets. In this paper a special lightweight acknowledgement-based method is developed that, contrary to existing methods, it uses ACK packets of MAC layer instead of adding new ACK packets to the network layer for confirmations. In fact, this novel method, named PIGACK, uses ACK packets of MAC 802.11 to piggyback confirmations from a receiver to a sender in the same transmission duration that the sender sends a data packet to the receiver. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed method considerably decreases the network overhead and increases the packet delivery ratio compared to the well-known method (2ACK).