Jaydip Sen. A Trust-Based Detection Algorithm of Selfish Packet Dropping Nodes in a Peer-to-Peer Wireless Mesh Network. In Recent Trends in Network Security and Applications. Volume 89 of Communications in Computer and Information Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010.
Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are evolving as a key technology for next-generation wireless networks showing rapid progress and numerous applications. These networks have the potential to provide robust and high-throughput data delivery to wireless users. In a WMN, high speed routers equipped with advanced antennas, communicate with each other in a multi-hop fashion over wireless channels and form a broadband backhaul. However, the throughput of a WMN may be severely degraded due to presence of some selfish routers that avoid forwarding packets for other nodes even as they send their own traffic through the network. This paper presents an algorithm for detection of selfish nodes in a WMN that uses statistical theory of inference for reliable clustering of the nodes based on local observations. Simulation results show that the algorithm has a high detection rate and a low false positive rate.