Achieving MANET protection without the use of superfluous fictitious nodes

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are everywhere. They are the basis for many current technologies (including VANETs, IoT, etc.), and used in multiple domains (including military, disaster zones, etc.). For them to function, routing protocols have been defined, taking into account the high mobility of network nodes. These protocols, however, are vulnerable to devastating attacks. Many solutions have been proposed for various attacks, including DCFM (Denial Contradictions with Fictitious nodes Mechanism) for the node isolation and gray-hole variants. In this work we present a refinement for DCFM, calculate its cost, and compare alternative algorithms. It will be shown that the entire fictitious mechanism is superfluous for some required security level. Examination of the results when under attack show that using DCFM's contradiction rules alone achieves the best cost-benefit ratio for networks with and without movement. In terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), however, the proposed algorithm achieves 93% for a 50-node static network, stabilizing on 100% for 90 nodes and above. When movement is present, the success drops to 67%, which is slightly better than the alternatives examined.