Endeavouring to be in the good books. Awarding DTN network use for acknowledging the reception of bundles

Abstract

This paper describes an incentive scheme for promoting the cooperation, and, therefore, avoiding selfish behaviours, in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) by rewarding participant nodes with cryptographic keys that will be required for sending bundles. DTN are normally sparse, and there are few opportunistic contacts, so forwarding of other’s bundles can be left out. Moreover, it is difficult to determine the responsible nodes in case of bundle loss. The mechanism proposed in this paper contributes to both problems at the same time. On one hand, cryptographic receipts are generated using time-limited Identity Based Cryptography (IBC) keys to keep track of bundle transmissions. On the other hand, these receipts are used to reward altruistic behaviour by providing newer IBC keys. Finally, these nodes need these IBC keys to send their own bundles. When all nodes behave in a cooperative way, this incentive scheme works as a virtuous circle and achieves a Nash equilibrium, improving very much the network performance in terms of latency. The scheme is not difficult to implement, and it can use an already existing IBC infrastructure used for other purposes in a DTN.