Integrated Social and QoS Trust-Based Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Delay Tolerant Networks

We propose and analyze a class of integrated social and quality of service (QoS) trustbased routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc delay tolerant networks. The underlying idea is to incorporate trust evaluation in the routing protocol, considering not only QoS trust properties but also social trust properties to evaluate other nodes encountered. We prove that our protocol is resilient against bad-mouthing, good-mouthing and whitewashing attacks performed by malicious nodes. By utilizing a stochastic Petri net model describing a delay tolerant network consisting of heterogeneous mobile nodes with vastly different social and networking behaviors, we analyze the performance characteristics of trust-based routing protocols in terms of message delivery ratio, message delay, and message overhead against epidemic routing and connectivitybased routing protocols. The results indicate that our trust-based routing protocols can approach the ideal performance obtainable by epidemic routing in delivery ratio and message delay, without incurring high message overhead. Further, integrated social and QoS trust-based protocols can effectively trade off message delay and message overhead for a significant gain in message delivery ratio over traditional connectivity-based routing protocols.