An Effective and Secure Epidemic Routing for Disruption-Tolerant Networks

Due to the unique characteristics of disruption-tolerant networks (DTNs), such as sporadic and unpredictable connectivity, routing protocols in DTNs are facing many challenges. Message propagation follows the manner of store-carry-and-forward and the existing opportunistic data forwards routings under the hypothesis that each individual node is ready to forward packets for others. This hypothesis might easily be violated by selfish nodes or even malicious nodes to reduce the ratio of packets delivery or even cause baleful attacks, such as whitewashing, wormhole, and bad-mouthing. In order to solve these problems, an effective and secure epidemic routing, namely trust-based epidemic routing (TBER) is proposed to stimulate selfish nodes to maximize their own performance to cooperate with other nodes while conforming to all restrictions and resist various attacks in a fully distributed manner without depending on any tamperproof hardware for DTNs. Simulation results reveal that TBER can eliminate selfish and malicious nodes effectively when building the route, furthermore, TBER also achieves the best performance in terms of the ratio of packet delivery when compared with Epidemic and Prophet protocols.