Cooperation enforcement scheme based on reputation for delay tolerant networks

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) benefit diverse applications where the condition suffers significant delays and disruptions. In DTNs, bundles, the in-transit messages, can be sent immediately over an existing link or be buffered until an opportunistic link appears. The opportunistic data transferring in DTNs relies on the hypothesis that each individual forwards bundles honestly. The hypothesis that all the nodes behave rationally to share their resources for the global connectivity is considered as a utopia, and might easily be impaired in the presence of selfish individuals. To address this problem, we propose a cooperation enforcement scheme based on reputation. For the unique features of DTNs, a protocol of bundle propagation is presented to cope with the detection of misbehavior, and a design of reputation manager is proposed to distinguish selfish individuals. The performance evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of our proposal.