  The research effort on mobile computing has focused mainly on routing and
usually assumes that all mobile devices (MDs) are cooperative. These
assumptions hold on military or search and rescue operations, where all hosts
are from the same authority and their users have common goals. The application
of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) as open networks has emerged recently but
proliferated exponentially. Energy is a valuable commodity in MANETs due to the
limited battery of the portable devices. Batteries typically cannot be replaced
in MANETs, making their lifetime limited. Diverse users, with unlike goals,
share the resources of their devices and ensuring global connectivity comes
very low in their priority. This sort of communities can already be found in
wired networks, namely on peer-to-peer networks. In this scenario, open MANETs
will likely resemble social environments. A group of persons can provide
benefits to each of its members as long as everyone provides his contribution.
For our particular case, each element of a MANET will be called to forward
messages and to participate on routing protocols. A selfish behavior threatens
the entire community and also this behavior is infectious as, other MDs may
also start to perform in the same way. In the extreme, this can take to the
complete sabotage of the network. This paper investigates the prevalent
malicious attacks in MANET and analyzes recent selfish trends in MANET. We
analyzed the respective strengths and vulnerabilities of the existing selfish
behaviour prevention scheme.
