CARISON: A Community and Reputation Based Incentive Scheme for Opportunistic Networks

Forwarding messages in opportunistic networks incurs costs for nodes in terms of storage and energy. Some nodes becomes selfish or even malicious. The selfish and malicious behaviors depress the connectivity of opportunistic networks. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose CARISON: a community and reputation based incentive scheme for opportunistic networks. CARISON allows every node belongs to a community and manage its reputation evidence and demonstrate its reputation whenever necessary. In order to kick out malicious nodes we propose altruism function which is a critical factor. Besides, considering the social attributes of nodes, we propose two ways to calculate reputation: intra-community reputation calculating and inter-community reputation calculating. Meanwhile this paper proposes the binary exponent punishment strategy to punish the nodes with low reputation. Extensive performance analysis and simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.