PRI: A Practical Reputation-based Incentive Scheme for Delay Tolerant Networks
Xi Zhang · KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems · 2012
Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) characterized by the lack of guaranteed end-to-end paths exploit opportunistic data forwarding mechanism, which depends on the hypothesis that nodes are willing to store, carry, and forward the in-transit messages in an opportunistic way.However, this hypothesis might easily be violated by the presence of selfish nodes constrained with energy, bandwidth, and processing power.To address this problem, we propose a practical reputation-based incentive scheme, named PRI, to stimulate honest forwarding and discipline selfish behavior.A novel concept of successful forwarding credential and an observation protocol are presented to cope with the detection of nodes' behavior, and a reputation model is proposed to determine egoistic individuals.The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our proposal.