Assessing the Vulnerability of DTN Data Relaying Schemes to Node Selfishness

Abstract: The main principle behind the working of delay tolerant networks (DTN) is the mobility of the nodes along with their contact sequences for exchanging data. Nodes which are a part of the DTN network can behave selfishly due to network reservation policy, especially when constrained to energy or storage space. Several forwarding protocols exist for spreading data but our focus is on the performance of popular data relaying protocols namely epidemic routing and two hop routing protocol in a situation where nodes exhibit various degrees of selfishness. Results of an analytical model show the performance advantage of epidemic routing over two hop routing decreases as the number of selfish nodes and intensity of the selfishness increases either deterministically or probabilistically. We practically asses the vulnerability of the above mentioned protocols using ONE simulator. We find that our result coincides with analytical results with some variations in the graph.