Securing Emergency Communications for the Next-Generation Networks

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) provides connectivity where there is uncertainty in end-to-end connectivity. In DTN, nodes exchange buffered messages upon an encounter. In disaster operations where the telecommunication and power infrastructures are completely broken down or destroyed, DTN can be used to support emergency communication till these infrastructures are restored. Security in DTN remains a major challenge because of its network characteristics such as frequent disruptions, dynamic topology, limited and constrained resources. One of the major threats in DTN is Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This attack mainly comes from intermediary nodes that drop or flood packets in the network which often results in the degradation of the network performance. In this paper, we propose a collaborative content-aware trust forwarding for emergency communication networks. Extensive simulations and validations show that the proposed schemes outperform existing routing and trust management protocols in the presence of malicious nodes and are resilient to trust related attacks.