DiCent: A Distributed Credit Incentive Mechanism for Opportunistic Networks

Incentive mechanisms are increasingly needed in opportunistic networks that contain nodes with selfish behavior. For this, credit-based mechanisms need a virtual bank (central entity) to promote the incentive. However, the existence of this central entity in an opportunistic network may be challenging. Therefore, we propose a credit incentive mechanism in this paper. The main contribution is that the mechanism does not use a virtual bank to distribute credits (reward for forwarding messages) but rather a decentralized approach. In addition, we propose mathematical modeling to represent the collection and distribution of credits to avoid Edge Insertion attacks in some instances. Finally, the proposed mechanism was evaluated through simulation using real mobility traces and different routing protocols and compared its performance with the RELICS incentive mechanism. The obtained results show that the proposed mechanism is promising in diminishing the occurrence of selfish nodes.