Development of a secure delay tolerant epidemic routing protocol

Abstract

Delay or Disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are networks in which an end-to-end path among a set of nodes is not always guaranteed. Examples of such networks are underwater networks, deep space networks, and remote and rural area communication. In extreme situations of lack of end to end connectivity, DTNs nodes store the messages and carry it, till it finds a suitable relay node to forward the message to the destination. Most of the existing researchers focused on developing smart routing protocols for DTNs. However, The security features of the messages being transported, such as confidentiality and integrity, have been largely disregarded in the existing literature and makes the messages prone to other threats along the path. So, in this project, we have addressed the issue of secure routing in DTNs and proposed a method with the help of public key cryptography using RSA and we have conducted various experiments and the results show improvement in the routing performance metrics. Experimental results show that by incorporating the security features, DTN performance metrics, such as delivery ratio, overhead ratio and delivery delay have been improved compared to traditional epidemic routing protocol.