Abstract
Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are challenged networks, where there may not exist an end-to-end path always. In such situations, for sending a message to destination, a source node has to store and carry it, till it finds a suitable node to forward. DTNs can be categorized as a subcategory of MANETs, based on mobility of the nodes, frequent network partitioning, etc. However, unlike in MANETs, there is no guarantee for connectivity among nodes in the network, which may cause nodes in the network to make use of encounter opportunity with other nodes for communication. In such scenarios, due to constraints on resources, some of the nodes may not forward messages further in the network and thus behave selfishly. In this paper, we have identified such selfish behavior of the nodes and proposed a heuristic-based selfishness detection and mitigation technique for DTNs. As part of simulation, we have conducted experiments using both real-world and synthetic traces and observed that DTN performance metrics were improved in terms of increasing delivery ratio, decreasing overhead ratio, and decreasing delivery delay.
