MobiID: A user-centric and social-aware reputation based incentive scheme for delay/disruption tolerant networks

Delay/Disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are wireless ad-hoc networks, where end-to-end connectivity can not be guaranteed and communications rely on the assumption that the nodes are willing to store-carry-and-forward bundles in an opportunistic way. However, this assumption would be easily violated due to the selfish nodes which are unwilling to consume precious wireless resources by serving as bundle relays. Incentive issue in DTNs is extraordinarily challenging due to the unique network characteristics. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose MobiID, a novel user-centric and social-aware reputation based incentive scheme for DTNs. Different from conventional reputation schemes which rely on neighboring nodes to monitor the traffic and keep track of each other's reputation, MobiID allows a node to manage its reputation evidence and show to demonstrate its reputation whenever necessary. We also define the concepts of self-check and community-check to speed up reputation establishment and allow nodes to form consensus views towards targets in the same community, which is based on our social metric by forwarding willingness. Performance simulation are given to demonstrate the security, effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.