4PR: Privacy preserving routing in mobile delay tolerant networks

摘要

Message routing is one of the major challenges in Mobile Delay Tolerant Networks (MDTNs) due to frequent and long-term network partitions. A number of routing protocols for MDTNs belong to the category of prediction-based routing protocols, which utilize the social encounter probability of nodes to guide message forwarding. However, these prediction-based routing protocols compromise the privacy of the nodes by revealing their mobility patterns. In this paper, we propose the Privacy Preserving Probabilistic Prediction-based Routing (4PR) protocol that forwards messages by comparing aggregated information about communities instead of individual nodes. Specifically, it compares the probability that at least one node in a community will encounter the destination node. We present theoretical security analyses as well as practical performance evaluations. Our simulations on a well established community-based mobility model demonstrate that our routing protocol has comparable performance to existing prediction based protocols. Additionally, the community information is computed efficiently and independently of the routing protocol. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.