CrowdRouting: Trustworthy and customized cross-domain routing based on crowdsourcing

Abstract

Cross-domain routing in Integrated Heterogeneous Networks (Inte-HetNet) should ensure efficient and secure data transmission across different network domains by satisfying diverse routing requirements. However, current solutions face numerous challenges in continuously ensuring trustworthy routing, fulfilling diverse requirements, achieving reasonable resource allocation, and safeguarding against malicious behaviors of network operators. We propose CrowdRouting, a novel cross-domain routing scheme based on crowdsourcing, dedicated to establishing sustained trust in cross-domain routing, comprehensively considering and fulfilling various customized routing requirements, while ensuring reasonable resource allocation and effectively curbing malicious behavior of network operators. Concretely, CrowdRouting employs blockchain technology to verify the trustworthiness of border routers in different network domains, thereby establishing sustainable and trustworthy cross-domain routing based on sustained trust in these routers. In addition, CrowdRouting ingeniously integrates a crowdsourcing mechanism into the auction for routing, achieving fair and impartial allocation of routing rights by flexibly embedding various customized routing requirements into each auction phase. Moreover, CrowdRouting leverages incentive mechanisms and routing settlement to encourage network domains to actively participate in cross-domain routing, thereby promoting optimal resource allocation and efficient utilization. Furthermore, CrowdRouting introduces a supervisory agency (e.g., undercover agent) to effectively suppress the malicious behavior of network operators through the game and interaction between the agent and the network operators. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations and comparisons with existing works, we demonstrate that CrowdRouting excels in providing trustworthy and fine-grained customized routing services, stimulating active participation in cross-domain routing, inhibiting malicious operator behavior, and maintaining reasonable resource allocation, all of which outperform baseline schemes.