Pi: A Practical Incentive Protocol for Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are a class of networks characterized by lack of guaranteed connectivity, typically low frequency of encounters between DTN nodes and long propagation delays within the network. As a result, the message propagation process in DTNs follows a store-carry-and-forward manner, and the in-transit bundle messages can be opportunistically routed towards the destinations through intermittent connections under the hypothesis that each individual DTN node is willing to help with forwarding. Unfortunately, there may exist some selfish nodes, especially in a cooperative network like DTN, and the presence of selfish DTN nodes could cause catastrophic damage to any well designed opportunistic routing scheme and jeopardize the whole network. In this paper, to address the selfishness problem in DTNs, we propose a practical incentive protocol, called Pi, such that when a source node sends a bundle message, it also attaches some incentive on the bundle, which is not only attractive but also fair to all participating DTN nodes. With the fair incentive, the selfish DTN nodes could be stimulated to help with forwarding bundles to achieve better packet delivery performance. In addition, the proposed Pi protocol can also thwart various attacks, which could be launched by selfish DTN nodes, such as free ride attack, layer removing and adding attacks. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Pi protocol in terms of high delivery ratio and lower average delay.