An artificial immune system-based strategy to enhance reputation in MANETs

In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) the nodes act as a host as well as a router, thereby forming a self-organizing network that does not rely upon fixed infrastructure, other than gateways to other networks. Security is important for MANETs and trust computation is used to improve collaboration between nodes. This paper proposes an Artificial Immune System-based reputation (AISREP) algorithm to compute trust and thereby provide a resilient reputation mechanism. In this paper, the presence of selfish nodes are considered. Selfish nodes are known to enhance the reputation of their selfish peers which in turn causes packet loss. In the event of the packet being routed using the AISREP algorithm, even though the number of selfish nodes increases, this algorithm identifies the selfish nodes and avoids using the selfish nodes from the routing path thereby improving the overall performance of the network.