Fighting against packet dropping misbehavior in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

In multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks, the packets are forwarded through intermediate nodes along the source–destination path. Without having any control on packets forwarding, an intermediate node can behave selfishly or maliciously to drop packets going through it. The dropper motivation is the preservation of its resources, like its limited energy (selfish behavior) or the launch of denial of service attack (malicious behavior). In this paper, we propose an approach to verify the correct forwarding of packets by an intermediate node. The Merkle tree principle has been used for implementation in justification of our proposed approach. Through simulation, we have shown our approach efficiency, and we have evaluated its performance in both proactive and reactive routing protocol in ad hoc network. Also, we have compared our approach with the watchdog and the 2-hop ACK which are well-known approaches in the literature.