A fair credit-based incentive mechanism for routing in DTN-based sensor network with nodes’ selfishness

Abstract

Abstract Due to the unguaranteed connectivity, wireless sensor networks based on delay tolerant network (DTN) are typically characterized by the opportunistic forwarding mechanism in transmission. Such a mechanism requires nodes to participate in forwarding messages actively. However, when the mechanism is used in the real world, selfish nodes will exhibit some non-cooperation behaviors. Therefore, some incentive mechanism may be designed to encourage selfish nodes. In order to solve the selfishness problem, we propose a fair credit-based incentive mechanism for routing in DTN-based sensor networks. In this mechanism, when a source node sends messages to its destination, each relay node will be rewarded with some credits. The accumulated credits are then used to evaluate the level of cooperation in the network. The selfish nodes with few credits are not able to get enough service from other nodes. With the fair incentive, all participating relays will get equal rewards by the trusted third party. In order to evaluate the proposed mechanism, we also perform some simulation, and the results demonstrate that the method can be used to support efficient routing for DTN-based sensor networks.

Keywords

• Sensor network
• Delay tolerant network
• Incentive mechanism
• Selfishness
• Credit reward