Detection of selfish nodes based on credit mechanism in opportunistic networks

Abstract

The existence of selfish nodes seriously affects the routing performance of opportunistic networks(OppNet).To protect the OppNet against the nodes’ selfish behavior,a credit-based selfish nodes detection mechanism was proposed to make it possible to keep away from such nodes during the process of message forwarding.The mechanism leverages 2-ACK messages to observe the nodes’behavior.Then the credit value was calculated based on the observation information and accordingly acts as the metric to distinguish the selfish nodes.Simulation results show that,when coupled with various routing algorithms,the mechanism could detect selfish nodes out accurately,and improve network performance effectively in terms of delivery rate and traffic load.

Keywords

• opportunistic network;selfish node;ACK;credit mechanism