A credit based routing mechanism to contrast selfish nodes in Delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerance Networks (DTNs) are the networks in which no end to end path is present between nodes or may partially present with limited period of time. To forward a packet, DTN uses store, carry and forward mechanism. Security is one of the key issues in DTN. There are various security threats such as message modification, packet dropped, and selfish node etc. Nodes which are the part of a DTN, can behave selfishly due to the network reservation policy, especially for node energy or storage space. This paper proposes a secure credit based incentive scheme to contrast selfish behavior and stimulate bundle forwarding cooperation among DTN nodes. The contact graphs are created to distribute credits to the participating nodes. The proposed scheme can be implemented in a fully distributed manner to thwart various attacks without relying on any tamperproof hardware. The vulnerability of the above mentioned protocols is simulated using ONE simulator.