A heuristic light weight security algorithm for resource constrained DTN routing

Delay Tolerant Network is a buzz word in Mobile Adhoc Network. Research in this direction started with the approach for interplanetary communication. Delay Tolerant Network (in short) DTN is an evolving research area. A way to store, carry and forward messages over the underlying existing infrastructure. The intermittent connectivity and limited resources of a DTN node make the routing difficult to implement in real world application. It is a constant endeavor of any network community to look for security and privacy inclusions in routing protocols. This paper proposes a Light Weight Security algorithm that forwards messages only to the trusted nodes, thus prevents the malicious or selfish nodes from affecting the entire DTN communication. In this paper, the trust value is computed based on their one to one association of mobile nodes in a DTN. Researchers have contributed by proposing a novel solution for detecting hostile mobile nodes. The computed trust value is further used to prevent malicious nodes to compromise the network. The proposed algorithm is simulated and its performance is analyzed with existing based on the performance metrics like overhead ratio, relayed, removed, delivery ratio and hop count. DTN is still evolving and to the best of our knowledge; the proposed work is first of its kind.