RETUNE · Resilience of Opportunistic Networks to Node Misbehaviors

Whereas there has been considerable work in the DTN community on the design and analysis of different data forwarding algorithms, much less attention has been paid to the associated security and cooperation issues (ref. Section B1.1.1). In particular, there is limited work on the resilience of these schemes to node misbehaviors. Nodes might defer from participating in the data forwarding process, in order to either not spend their (limited) resources for relaying data of no interest to them (selfishness) or sabotage (certain) data transfers (maliciousness). Even less has been reported in literature on countermeasures to such node misbehaviors, so that their impact be contained and a certain (minimum) performance level be possible. The candidate Fellow argues that resilience should be a major design objective for protocols and mechanisms designed for opportunistic networking besides the more standard performance-oriented objectives (throughput, delay, resource consumption). Rather than a posteriori assessing the efficiency of schemes designed under the optimistic and frequently false assumption of perfect node cooperation, he argues in favor of a priori accounting for the (highly likely) lack of it when designing a scheme. As such, the resilience of opportunistic networking to node misbehavior should be addressed in parallel with the other research work on these networks, should these schemes ever be widely deployed and avoid the fate of the ad hoc networks. The research proposed in the context of this fellowship aims at addressing this need, promoting resilience aspects to visible elements in the opportunistic networking research agenda, and producing knowledge and results that will increase the attractiveness of and confidence in the deployment of opportunistic networking solutions.