A collaborative trust management scheme for emergency communication using delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) comprises of nodes with small and limited resources including power and memory capacity. We propose the use of DTN as an alternate means of communication for the dissemination of emergency information in a post-disaster evacuation operation. We investigate the performance of DTN in providing emergency communication support services under packet dropping attacks. We consider internally motivated attacks where the nodes that are part of the emergency rescue team are compromised with malicious behaviours thereby dropping packets to disrupt the message dissemination during the evacuation operation. A way to mitigating malicious behaviour and improve network performance of DTN is to use incentives in exchanging information between nodes. Unlike existing schemes, we consider the Basic Watchdog Detection System which detects and acts against misbehaving nodes to reduce their overall impact on the network performance. We design a Collaborative Trust Management Scheme (CTMS) which is based on the Bayesian detection watchdog approach to detect selfish and malicious behaviour in DTN nodes. We have evaluated our proposed CTMS through extensive simulations and compared our results with the other existing schemes. Our evaluations show that the use of adequate collaborative strategies between well behaved nodes could improve the performance of Watchdog schemes taking into account the delivery ratio, routing cost and the message delay from the source node to the destination node