TA-ACS: A trust aware adaptive carrier selection scheme for reliable routing in delay tolerant networks

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is an infrastructure-less wireless network characterized with sporadic link connectivity and probable co-existence of high end-to-end delay. It relies on opportunistic contacts for message forwarding and builds an overlay atop disconnected networks to combat network disruptions through persistence storage. The lack of infrastructure and opportunistic contacts make DTN highly vulnerable for misbehaving (both malicious and selfish) nodes. Existence of such nodes have disadvantageous contributions (in terms of network throughput and message overhead) to the network. This paper proposes a novel Trust Aware Adaptive Carrier Selection (TA-ACS) scheme for assuring reliable routing in DTN. The efficiency of TA-ACS is evaluated through extensive simulations study in the presence of misbehaving nodes. Further, a comparative analysis of TA-ACS with other existing schemes has been carried out in terms of message delivery ratio, removed messages count, and message overhead. Results generated from the simulations verified the usability and efficacy of TA-ACS in DTN.