Malicious node aware wireless multi hop networks: a systematic review of the literature and recommendations for future research

2025-06-06

AI Summary

Wireless multihop networks (WMNs) are inherently vulnerable to malicious node attacks due to their decentralized architecture, leading to degraded throughput, increased end-to-end delay, and elevated control overhead. To address this, this paper presents a systematic literature review of 127 studies, offering the first unified taxonomy and comparative evaluation of malicious node detection mechanisms across seven wireless network paradigms—including MANETs, WSNs, and VANETs—and identifies eight fundamental detection paradigms. It proposes a standardized evaluation framework incorporating key dimensions such as detection accuracy, overhead, and scalability, along with a dynamic routing–aware malicious node perception architecture. Through bibliometric analysis and cross-network benchmarking, the study reveals three persistent bottlenecks: insufficient real-time responsiveness, poor energy efficiency, and weak resilience against colluding adversaries. Finally, it outlines a comprehensive research roadmap to guide future work in adaptive, lightweight, and collusion-resistant intrusion detection for WMNs.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Other Foundations of Multi Agent Systems
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Anomaly/Outlier Detection
• Machine Learning: Multi-instance/Multi-view Learning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Graph neural networks and deep learning approaches for Web-related graphs

Abstract

Wireless communication provides great advantages that are not available through their wired counterparts such as flexibility, ease of deployment and use, cost reductions, and convenience. Wireless multi-hop networks (WMN) do not have any centralized management infrastructure. Wireless multi-hop networks have many benefits since proposed. In such networks when a node wants to send a packet to a destination where is not in the transmission range, depend on some intermediate nodes. In this type of networks packet sending is in the form of multiple hop until destination and this work is dynamic. Lack of centralized management cause that some nodes show malicious function. Malicious nodes are that receive packets and drop them maliciously. These malicious nodes could have many reasons such as hardware failure, software failure or lack of power. Such nodes make multiple packets drop from the network and the performance of network strongly decreases. As a result, the throughput of the network decrease, increase end-to-end delay and increase overhead. Therefore, we must aware from presence of malicious node in the network and do routing based on this awareness. Therefore, this paper aims to study and review the present malicious node detection methods that proposed in literatures. We categorized networks in groups, including ad hoc networks, MANET, DTN, Opportunistic networks, WSN, VANET and other wireless networks and compare malicious node detection met

Problem

• Detecting malicious nodes in wireless multi-hop networks
• Reviewing existing malicious node detection methods
• Comparing detection approaches across various network types

Innovation

• Detects malicious nodes in wireless networks
• Reviews various wireless network types
• Compares detection methods in literature