Reduction of Quality (ROQ) attack is one of the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks which affect the MANETs. Instead of refusing the clients from the services completely, these RoQ attacks throttle the TCP throughput heavily and reduce the QoS to end systems. To mitigate this RoQ attack in MANET, we propose to design a distributed defense technique in this paper. Initially, a mechanism for monitor node selection is designed such that the monitoring nodes should cover the entire network. These monitoring nodes estimate the short-lived flows to observe the sudden increase in the traffic load in a short time. When the total traffic load of such flow exceeds a threshold value, an attack is detected and the corresponding node is added into a local blacklist. The local blacklist from all the monitoring nodes is sent to a master node from which it evaluates the attacker. The attacker will be notified by the master node to all the monitoring nodes so that all the nodes become aware of the attacker. By simulation results, we show that the proposed technique improves the throughput with reduced packet drops.
General TermsWireless Ad hoc networks, QoS