Towards An Efficient Monitoring in Multi-hop Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) are vulnerable to many types of attacks. Monitoring MANET is then important to ensure high level performance. This monitoring can be achieved by two operations: first by observing the operational states of the connected mobile nodes in relation with the existing links; and second by controlling the application quality of service. Many challenges arise in the MANET self-monitoring. Hence, the non-cooperation behavior of mobile nodes can decrease the monitoring performance and may cause damages. Moreover, some malicious participants may disrupt the monitoring system through altering the collected data, reporting false measurements, defining new management policies or flooding false alarms. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new self monitoring scheme that comprises a new multi-criteria monitors' election method while integrating a new trust based cooperation technique based on game theory. This scheme does, not only, elect the trustworthy monitors having a large capacity, but it also can guarantee the continuous participants' control.The conducted experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms the cluster-based and CDS-based architectures in terms of the number of exchanged messages, excluded regular monitors and that of detected irregular monitors.