The Impact of Selfishness Attack on Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructureless network that has the ability to configure itself without any centralized management. The topology of MANET changes dynamically which makes it open for new nodes to join it easily. The openness area of MANET makes it very vulnerable to different types of attacks. One of the most dangerous attacks is selfishness attack. In this type of attack, each node tries to save its resources, behave selfishly or non-cooperatively by not forwarding packets that are generated by other nodes. Routing in MANET is susceptible to selfishness attack and this is a crucial issue which deserves to be studied and solved. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to study the impact of selfishness attack on two routing protocols namely, Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV), as a try to find the most resistant routing protocol to such attack. The contribution of this paper is a new Selfishness Attack Model (SAM) which applies selfishness attack on the two chosen routing protocols in the NS-2 simulator. According to the conducted simulation results, AODV shows higher performance than DSDV under the effect of selfishness attack.