A secure routing based on social trust in opportunistic networks

Abstract

Routing plays an important role in opportunistic networks (OPPNETs). Many routing schemes in OPPNETs assume that data dissemination is not attacked by misbehavior nodes. However, in practice, OPPNETs may be susceptible to various kinds of attacks due to frequent disruption in communication links. In this paper, we propose a social trust model for secure routing in OPPNETs, which exploits the contact status, forwarding ability and common attributes to evaluate social trust. And then, we propose a novel trust based routing algorithm and buffer management algorithm for the secure routing strategy, considering network coding in data dissemination. This routing strategy not only ensures data dissemination via trusted nodes but also reduces delivery cost while traversing through trusted paths. Demonstrated by simulation results in ONE, the proposed secure routing can achieve better performance in terms of delivery ratio, delivery delay and delivery cost as compared to existing solutions.