Trust Management for Encounter-Based Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

The authors propose and analyze a class of trust management protocols for encounter-based routing in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The underlying idea is to incorporate trust evaluation in the routing protocol, considering not only Quality-of-Service (QoS) trust properties (connectivity) but also social trust properties (honesty and unselfishness) to evaluate other nodes encountered. Two versions of trust management protocols are considered: an equal-weight QoS and social trust management protocol (called trust-based routing) and a QoS only trust management protocol (called connectivity-based routing). By utilizing a stochastic Petri net model describing a DTN behavior, they analyze the performance characteristics of these two routing protocols in terms of message delivery ratio, latency, and message overhead.