On realising a strategy for resilience in opportunistic networks

Because of our increased dependence on communication networks, resilience needs to be a fundamental property of the future Internet. We define resilience as the ability of a network to provide an acceptable level of service in the light of various challenges, such as episodic connectivity or malicious actors. There have been many helpful point solutions to improve resilience in the Internet, yet a systematic approach is necessary to make resilience a first class citizen of the future Internet. In this paper, we apply our general resilience strategy, called D² R² + DR, to an opportunistic networking scenario, showing how it can be used to address the challenge of selfish nodes. The strategy describes a real-time control loop to allow dynamic adaptation of the networked system in response to challenges, and an off-line loop that aims to improve the performance of the network via a process of reflection. We briefly describe our approach to quantifying resilience, and its use in our scenario. Initial simulation results indicate the promise of our approach.