Selfish Behavior on Packet Forwarding: An Emergent Security Problem in MANET

Abstract

The limitation in energy resources along with the multi-hop nature of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) causes a new vulnerability, that does not exist in traditional networks. To preserve its own battery, a node may behave selfishly and would not forward packets originated from other nodes, while using their services and consuming their resources. This deviation from the correct behavior represents a potential threat against the quality and the availability of the forwarding service. Recently, this challenging problem received more and more attention among researchers, and some solutions have been proposed. Still, to the best of our knowledge, no paper surveying these solutions has been published yet. In this entry, we deal with the emergent problem of node selfishness in MANETs, and we provide a state-of-the-art on the current proposed solutions.