Reliable operational services in MANETs by misbehavior-tolerant quorum systems

Operational services in MANETs, such as resource location and distribution of connectivity information, deal with node mobility and resource constraints to support applications. The reliability and availability of these services can be assured by data management approaches, as replication techniques using quorum systems. However, these systems are vulnerable to selfish and malicious nodes, that intentionally do not collaborate with replication operations or spread malicious data while participating in data replication. QS², a bio-inspired scheme to tolerate selfish and malicious nodes in replication operation of quorum systems can effectively detect misbehaving nodes in quorum systems, increasing data reliability. This paper evaluates the performance of QS² considering two realistic scenarios: the distribution of local market information in a downtown city and the distribution of traffic and schedule information in bus lines. Simulation results show that QS² improves the reliability of replicated data in MANETs and the amount of data compromised by misbehaving nodes inside the replication system is much lower than outdated data due to network topology.