Intention aware misbehavior detection for post-disaster opportunistic communication over peer-to-peer DTN

Delay tolerant network (DTN) has been successfully proposed for setting up emergency post disaster communication networks when normal communication infrastructure is typically incapacitated. DTN being a network where participating nodes transmit messages to the final destination in multiple hops, its success depends on the cooperation of these participating nodes. Performance of such cooperation based networks get severely affected by misbehaving nodes that do not participate in message forwarding either due to reasons that are beyond its control (non-availability of appropriate forwarders, decreasing battery life, etc.) or out of certain malicious intentions. The misbehavior detection schemes, proposed so far, rarely investigate the actual intention behind misbehavior of participating nodes and do not attempt to restore the reputation of falsely alleged nodes. In this paper, we propose iDetect, a reputation based intention aware misbehavior detection scheme that uses contextual evidences to analyze the intention behind a node’s misbehavior. The scheme boosts the low reputation of incorrectly ostracized nodes and includes them in future communication. Re-inclusion of these nodes increases the number of genuine forwarders in the network which, in turn, assists in efficient delivery of crucial post disaster situational messages. Results of extensive simulation, using ONE simulator, substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed iDetect scheme over state-of-the-art competing schemes, in terms of detection ratio, availability ratio, etc. while not compromising on standard network performance in a post disaster communication scenario.