An Overview of Game Theoretic Approach to Intrusion Detection System in MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are a collection of mobile nodes that communicates over wireless media. Performance of MANET depends on the cooperative participation of nodes in packet forwarding. During packet forwarding from source to destination, it takes help of middle hop depending on the distance. Middle hops play different role in different times. Nodes in MANETs suffer from limited resources specially battery power. To save its resources, middle hop acts like selfish node in which nodes are simply dropping packets instead of forwarding the same to its neighbor. Malicious nodes drop packets maliciously instead of forwarding them to destination. Performance parameters of network are effected by malicious behavior of nodes. Intrusion detection system (IDS) are designed to detect malicious nodes. Some of these IDS suffer from some arbitrariness. Game theoretic approach helps to remove these arbitrariness from the IDS and to define the equilibrium state of the network. Objective of this paper is to discuss the game theory in MANETs and also to discuss about game theoretic approach to detect malicious nodes in MANETs. Key words-MANETs, IDS, game theory, selfish node, packet forwarding, malicious node.