An investigation on the unwillingness of nodes to participate in mobile delay tolerant network routing

Message routing in mobile delay tolerant networks inherently relies on the cooperation between nodes. In most existing routing protocols, the participation of nodes in the routing process is taken as granted. However, in reality, nodes can be unwilling to participate. We first show in this paper the impact of the unwillingness of nodes to participate in existing routing protocols through a set of experiments. Results show that in the presence of even a small proportion of nodes that do not forward messages, performance is heavily degraded. We then analyze two major reasons of the unwillingness of nodes to participate, i.e., their rational behavior (also called selfishness) and their wariness of disclosing private mobility information.Our main contribution in this paper is to survey the existing related research works that overcome these two issues. We provide a classification of the existing approaches for protocols that deal with selfish behavior. We then conduct experiments to compare the performance of these strategies for preventing different types of selfish behaviors. For protocols that preserve the privacy of users, we classify the existing approaches and provide an analytical comparison of their security guarantees.

► We show the impact of the unwillingness of nodes to participate in existing routing protocols.
► Results show that even a small proportion of nodes that do not forward messages, performance is heavily degraded.
► We analyze two major reasons of the unwillingness of nodes to participate, i.e., their selfish behavior and their wariness of disclosing private mobility information.
► We conduct experiments to compare the performance of the strategies for preventing different types of selfish behaviors.