RETUNE -
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.