SIS: Secure Incentive Scheme for Delay Tolerant Networks

Due to the lack of end-to-end connectivity between mobile nodes, delay tolerant networks (DTNs) exploit the opportunistic forwarding mechanism. This mechanism requires nodes to forward messages in a cooperative way. Nevertheless, nodes may exhibit selfish behavior, in particular when they are constrained with respect to the battery energy, computational power, and/or storage space. In this paper, we propose a new secure incentive scheme (called SIS) enhance the cooperation among nodes and thwart the selfish behaviors by rewarding the intermediate nodes for their actively forwarding behavior. Moreover, we implement the scheme by ONE, and we conduct a complete set of simulations to compare its performance in terms of message delivery ratio and average delivery delay metrics. Our analysis provides a comparison of the proposed scheme's performance with Epidemic Routing and Spray And Wait Routing. The Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our SIS scheme can improve the cooperation level among the nodes.