Analyzing the impact of selfishness on probabilistic routing algorithms in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are sparse networks, in which communication is possible without end-to-end connectivity. A node in DTN is considered as selfish when that node is not willing to forward the packet further in the network, and drops the packet from the network. Probabilistic algorithms such as Prophet, MaxProp, etc, does not consider the selfishness of the nodes and always choose the relay node with the highest delivery probability to the destination. In real time, there can be a scenario present in which few nodes in a network acts selfishly. In this paper, we assess the effects of the presence of few selfish nodes in the network on the performance of probabilistic routing algorithms with the help of ONE Simulator, and also proposes a method to increase the performance of the probabilistic algorithms in the presence of the same.