An altruism-based trust-dependent message forwarding protocol for opportunistic networks

In opportunistic networks (OppNets), which are characterized by intermittent end-to-end connections, the messages are routed in a store-carry-and-forward fashion using the locally inferred knowledge about the behavior of nodes. As such, most OppNets routing protocols use social metrics that are dependent on the nodes' past information. But the participation of nodes in the message forwarding process is not guaranteed without incentivizing them because most nodes are reluctant in sharing their private resources for public uses. In this paper, some socially derived psychological attributes of a node are introduced to ensure their trustworthy participation in the message forwarding process, leading to the design of an altruism-dependent trust-based data forwarding mechanism for OppNets (called ATDTN). In this protocol, each node is associated with a dynamically changing altruism value representing its trust in the network, which is used to determine its status with regard to its participation in message forwarding. Through trace-driven simulations using the ONE simulator, it is shown that ATDTN outperforms IronMan and SimBet protocols for routing in OppNets (respectively, 18% and 48% improvement), in terms of delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, overhead count, and average number of hops, under varying buffer size and time-to-live.