JoWUA

Abstract

In an opportunistic network (OppNet), message forwarding among the nodes occurs by exploiting the direct contacts through intermittent end-to-end connectivity while relying on the cooperation among these nodes. As such, any misbehavior intention of some nodes may cause serious security threats in the network. To address this issue, several trust-based incentive schemes have been investigated in the literature, with the goal of stimulating the participation of nodes in the routing procedure. However, most of these protocols are susceptible to collusion attacks. In this sense, this paper proposes a secure and reciprocity Encounter-based Trust-driven Barter protocol (denoted ETB), which uses a cryptography mechanism to ensure resilience against collusion attacks in the network. Simulation results show a performance improvement of 19% on average over the IronMan protocol, chosen as benchmark scheme, on account of throughput, average delay, average number of hops, and overhead count.