RADON: reputation-assisted data forwarding in opportunistic networks

Abstract

In opportunistic networks, the probability of encountering a destination node is popularly used to select a qualified forwarder; however, it can not represent the competency of delivering data in a hostile wireless environment, because a malicious node can bloat its such probability to intercept data from others. In this paper, we design a reputation-based framework to more accurately evaluate an encounter's competency of delivering data, which can be integrated with a large family of existing data forwarding protocols in opportunistic networks. In particular, a special message, called Positive Feedback Message (PFM), is proposed to help monitor the forwarding behavior of a node. We also design a Reputation-Assisted Data forwarding protocol for Opportunistic Networks (RADON), which integrates our reputation framework with a bare-bone data forwarding protocol using the number of times of previous encounters as the metric to select the next qualified forwarder. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate that RADON effectively improves the network performance (e.g., data delivery ratio) against "black hole" attacks.