A trust-based framework for data forwarding in opportunistic networks

In general, the encounter probability is leveraged to evaluate whether a node is a qualified next-hop forwarder in Opportunistic Networks (OppNets); however, it does not truly present the node's competency of delivering data in a hostile wireless environment, because a malicious node can arbitrarily bloat that probability to intercept data from others. In this paper, we design a trust-based framework to more accurately evaluate an encounter's delivery competency, which can be flexibly integrated with a large family of existing data forwarding protocols designed for OppNets. As a case study, we integrate our proposed framework with PROPHET, and demonstrate its effectiveness against "black hole" attacks through experimental study. (c) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.