Incentive minimization using energy and buffer efficient routing protocol over Blockchain enabled DTN

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a kind of sporadically connected mobile networks in which the network is intermittent, and end-to-end path is hard to establish. However, as devices in DTNs may often have limited energy and buffer, the network performance will be inevitably affected, especially in our application domain, i.e. the post-disaster scenario. Thus, to start with, we present an appropriate energy and buffer efficient routing protocol (EBRout) for efficient message transmission over a smartphone based DTN. Due to limited battery and storage capacity in mobile devices, a major problem in DTNs is to convince forwarder nodes to participate in forwarding messages. Thus, for improving cooperation among the nodes, an incentivizing scheme is proposed which works in two steps. As the first step, we propose an optimization model to find the minimum incentive. Next, we propose a blockchain-based incentive allocation model that uses Ethereum platform built on top of a DTN-Blockchain integrated environment. The use of blockchain helps to create an immutable and globally accessible record for incentive allocation. The performance of the entire scheme is estimated through extensive simulation in ONE simulator, Python PuLP and Ethereum platform. Performance analyses indicate that the average incentive paid using our proposed optimization model is much lower than the average incentive paid without using the optimization model. Also, the results substantiate the efficiency of the proposed scheme over the competing schemes, in terms of delivery ratio, energy and message overhead without negotiating the blockchain performance in terms of processing time and gas consumption.