TBMOR: A lightweight trust-based model for secure routing of opportunistic networks

Abstract

Opportunistic networks are self-organizing dynamic networks that use the communication opportunities presented by node movement to enable data delivery. Due to the indirect nature of inter-node connections and dynamic topology, opportunistic networks are vulnerable to malicious attacks, which poses a great challenge to their security. In this paper, we first propose a trust-based model for the secure routing of opportunistic networks (TBMOR), which incorporates forwarding positive degree (FP) and node activity degree (NA) into the calculation of trust value, evaluates nodes in the network by a dynamic combination of direct trust and indirect trust, and then optimizes the next node list using trust values and pruning strategies. Secondly, this paper extends the network life cycle by dynamically setting up energy thresholds to reduce network redundancy by dynamically partitioning the number of replicas using trust values.Simulation results show that compared to other routers, TBMOR can effectively resist malicious attacks, has a higher message delivery rate and lower transmission latency than other routers.

Keywords

• Opportunistic networks
• Trust model
• Routing algorithm