Selfish and malicious behavior in Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are composed of nodes that cooperate to forward messages despite connectivity issues. This paper focuses on the problem of some nodes making limited or no contribution to the network. Misbehaving nodes consume network resources, reducing its performance and availability, therefore they constitute an important problem that should be considered. We study the impact of node misbehavior on seven DTN routing protocols using a large set of simulations. The results show that different protocols are more resilient to different types of node misbehavior.