Message trust-based secure multipath routing protocol for opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks (OppNets) are composed of wireless nodes opportunistically communicating with each other. These networks are designed to operate in a challenging environment characterized by high delay, intermittent connectivity, and no guarantee of fixed path between the sender and the destination nodes. One of the most vital issues in designing and maintaining practical networks over a time period is the security of the messages flowing in OppNets. This paper proposes a new method called message trust-based secure multipath routing protocol (MT-SMRP) for opportunistic networks. Various routing protocols such as ProPHet, Epidemic, and HiBOp, to name a few, have been proposed for OppNets, but none of these have applied a secure multipath routing technique. The proposed MT-SMRP scheme relays the message to the destination through the disjoint paths, each applying a soft-encryption technique to prevent message fabrication attacks. Simulations are conducted using the Haggle Infocom'06 real mobility data traces, showing that when time-to-live is varied, (1) the proposed MT-SMRP scheme outperforms D-MUST by 18.10%, 7.55%, 3.275%, respectively, in terms of delivery probability, messages dropped, and average latency; (2) it also outperforms SHBPR by 21.30%, 7.44%, and 4.85%, respectively, in terms of delivery probability, messages dropped, and average latency. Under similar performance metrics, the performance of MT-SMRP is also shown to be better than that of D-MUST and SHBPR when the buffer size (respondents. the message generation interval) is varied.