Separation of detection authorities (SDA) approach for misbehavior detection in wireless ad hoc network

Wireless ad hoc network is a distributed wireless network without the presence of a physical network infrastructure. Having a limited wireless transmission range, all the nodes need to cooperate with each other during packet forwarding in order to maintain the connectivity. In addition, the lack of energy resources may cause a selfish node to drop legitimate packets which eventually disrupt the network performance. In fact, many detection protocols have been proposed to discourage such behaviour. However, the implemented penalization is ineffective as not all the surrounding nodes execute in the same manner. Moreover, most of them have neglected the existence of the malicious node that could inflict them directly and indirectly. In this paper, we present the separation of detection authorities (SDA) approach to detect and exclude the misbehaved nodes in the network. The SDA distributes the detection authorities to the reporter, investigation agents, and the central authority where each of them takes charge of different detection process. To ensure accuracy, only the central authority will report the result. Our evaluation demonstrated that SDA can detect misbehaved nodes in the network effectively.