A Secure Credit-Based Incentive Scheme for Opportunistic Networks

In opportunistic networks, due to the limited resources such as energy, buffer and wireless bandwidth, nodes will be selfish and unwilling to forward messages for others, which will seriously degrade the routing performance. Therefore, it is necessary to design an effective incentive scheme to motivate the selfish nodes to cooperatively forward messages. However, current incentive schemes for opportunistic networks are vulnerable to various attacks launched by selfish nodes, such as node insertion attack, node removal attack, and content modification attack. To address this problem, we propose a secure credit-based incentive scheme (SCIS) for single copy routing, which is incentive compatible and resistant to various attacks. Extensive simulations are carried out in the realistic trace to demonstrate the effectiveness of SCIS scheme.