The mobility feature leads to the proliferation of wireless networks. Among all kindsof wireless networks, the peer-to-peer nature of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET)makes such networks very promising. Unlike traditional wired networks, MANETs donot need infrastructure to work properly. The most commonly used routing protocols formobile ad hoc networks do not take into consideration security, assuming all the mobilenodes will coordinate with each other. Such routing protocols along with the absence ofinfrastructure make MANETs prone to a variety of faults such as packet dropping, packetmisrouting, etc.This dissertation addresses the security issues of MANET by presenting the hardwareassisted misbehaving nodes detection. In such a scheme, the hardware is responsible fordetecting the misbehaving nodes. The detection results are sent to software layer ofmobile nodes. Upon receiving the detection results, the software layer can exclude themisbehaving nodes from the networks.This dissertation presents two hardware detection schemes. Two-timer is a low-costdetection scheme. There are only two timers utilized in the scheme. The two-timerscheme can be used to detect simple packet dropping with good detection performance.The other detection scheme, cache scheme, can detect both packet dropping and packetmisrouting. The cache scheme needs more resource than the two-timer scheme alongwith better detection performance
