TR-SDTN: Trust Based Efficient and Scalable Routing in Hostile Social DTNs

A delay tolerant network (DTN) presents a new communication model, which uses a store-carry-forward approach to deliver messages due to the nature of the network. With the development of the mobile internet, the research on DTNs becomes a hot topic. One critical issue in the DTNs with social characteristics is that there could exist selfish and malicious nodes which block important data and as a result intentionally disturb the communication. Although there are many research works which address the issue and adopt various trust models to encourage nodes to forward information, most of them have not considered the social characteristics of the mobile nodes and they have not handled the selfish behaviors and attacks in a systematic way. In view of these defects, we propose a novel solution to address the selfish and security issues in social DTNs. Based on nodes’ social characteristics, a dynamic trust model is proposed to prevent bad-mouthing and ballot stuffing attacks and the Shannon entropy function is introduced to avoid blackhole and greyhole attacks. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance of social DTNs. And the simulation is proved to be consistent with the results from theoretical analysis.