Trust-based protocol for securing routing in opportunistic networks

Abstract

It is hard to set up an end-to-end connection between source and destination in Opportunistic Networks, due to dynamic network topology and the lack of infrastructure. Instead, the store-carry-forward mechanism is used to achieve communication. Namely, communication in Opportunistic Networks relies on the cooperation among nodes. Correspondingly, Opportunistic Networks have some issues like long delays, packet loss and so on, which lead to many challenges in Opportunistic Networks. However, malicious nodes do not follow the routing rules, or refuse to cooperate with benign nodes. Some misbehaviors like black-hole attack, gray-hole attack may arbitrarily bloat their delivery competency to intercept and drop data. Selfishness in Opportunistic Networks will also drop some data from other nodes. These misbehaviors will seriously affect network performance like the delivery success ratio. In this paper, we design a Trust-based Routing Protocol (TRP), combined with various utility algorithms, to more comprehensively evaluate the competency of a candidate node and effectively reduce negative effects by malicious nodes. In simulation, we compare TRP with other protocols, and shows that our protocol is effective for misbehaviors.