A secure message delivery scheme with path tracking for delay tolerant networks

In delay tolerant networks (DTNs), message delivery is operated in an opportunistic way through store-carry and forward relaying, and every DTN node is in anticipation of cooperation for data forwarding from others. Unfortunately, there always exist some selfish nodes that are reluctant to contribute to this cooperative data forwarding procedure so as to save their valuable storage buffer, limited computation power and precious energy. In order to stimulate nodes´ willingness to participate in data forwarding, a number of incentive schemes have been proposed recently. However, most existing incentive schemes simply ignore efforts of nodes involved in message delivery if messages delivered fail to reach their destinations. Due to the nature of DTN, such as intermittent connectivity, it is not unusual to have unreliable message delivery, which results in unrewarded or wasted efforts for participating nodes and may discourage them from participating in future data forwarding. Therefore, it is crucial to recognize contribution of every node involved in a data forwarding procedure even the message it helps to forward doesn´t successfully reach its destination. However, how to track all delivery paths so as to give every intermediate node some incentive for their cooperative efforts of data forwarding is still an open research problem. To address this problem, we propose a secure message forwarding scheme with path tracking. The proposed method is end-to-end secure with data source and identity authentication. In addition, it can thwart some well known attacks including edge inserting attack, sibling inserting attack and free riding attack.