Background:
Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET’s) have recently attracted attention as it is independent of any
pre-existing network infrastructure or centralized administration. Security in MANET’s thus becomes a major concern due
to its open and dynamic architecture.
Objective:
We have introduced a dynamic mean field game theoretic approach to enable an individual node in MANETs
to make strategic security defense decisions without centralized administration.
Method:
The nodes in MANET’s act as a router to forward data packets and exchange routing information. Ad-hoc On
demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol is one of the standard MANET routing protocols which can be easily attacked
by the fraudulent nodes. The fraudulent nodes can be deceptive and mislead the transmission of data packets in the
network by providing shorter path and highest destination sequence number. Game theory finds wide application as a
statistical and mathematical tool to model such dynamic networks and provide security.
Results:
We have implemented mean field game theory for addressing security issue in MANET’s. Each node in this
dynamic distributed network, knows the information about its own state as well as the average reflection of the whole
mean field. The players can strategically make distributed security defense decisions under adverse conditions. Unlike
static threshold-based scheme for security, in our study the threshold is estimated dynamically. Each node checks whether
the received Route REPly (RREP) sequence number is higher than a dynamically updated threshold value.
Conclusion:
The comparative performance analysis of throughput (TR), packet delivery rate (PDR) and average cost
(AC) has been demonstrated. Game theory has a vital role to validate and justify the intuitive strategic actions taken by
each player to maximize their utility by playing optimal strategy. On the basis of the dynamic threshold calculated, the
higher throughput and PDR could be achieved by eliminating the misleading paths. Simulation results corroborate that our
dynamic mean field game theoretic scheme outperforms the static scheme.
Discussion:
A dynamic approach for mobile ad hoc networks is presented in this paper to improve the performance of the
network in hostile environment. We have introduced a dynamic mean field game theoretic approach to enable an
individual node in MANETs to make strategic security defense decisions without centralized administration. In this dynamic distributed network, each node in the proposed scheme only needs to know its own state information and the
average reflection of the whole mean field.
A Mean Field Game Theoretic Approach for Security Enhancements in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks