An incentive congestion control strategy for DTNs with mal-behaving nodes

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are characterized by intermittent connectivity, high delay and without end-to-end path from the source to the destination. The fundamental way of message routing in DTNs is store-and-forward. Thus, the mal-behaving nodes in the networks, which are uncooperative to relay messages, will significantly undermine the routing performance. In this paper, we propose a novel congestion control solution for DTNs with mal-behaving nodes named Incentive Multi-paths Routing with Alternative Storage (IMRASFC). IMRASFC firstly initializes multi-paths routing to mitigate link load; then it establishes rules to bestir mal-behaving nodes to store and forward messages; at last it selects alternative nodes with available storage to store data which would otherwise be dropped given buffer exhaustion. Simulation results show that IMRASFC improves the performance of routing algorithms significantly, especially when the number of copies in the network is large.