Internal threats avoiding based forwarding protocol in social selfish delay tolerant networks

In traditional delay tolerant networks (DTNs), there exists a potential assumption that the nodes are willing to help others for packet forwarding. However, in the real application scenarios, such as civilian DTNs, selfish behaviors always widely exist. Therefore, the assumption that nodes are cooperative is not realistic in all applications. Currently, most of the existing incentive mechanism focuses on individual selfish behaviors. Few research work is proposed on social selfish behavior in DTNs. In this paper, we stimulate the nodes to cooperate with others by using a virtual bank mechanism. This incentive mechanism can effectively avoid individual selfish behaviors. Meanwhile, we observe that under this individual selfish incentive mechanism, the social distribution is unfair. That means the poverty nodes would appear in the networks, and become the internal threats for the social DTNs. To avoid this, we introduce the Gini coefficient to measure the inequality of the social distribution. Furthermore, by using the taxation strategy, we avoid the internal threats caused by social selfishness. To demonstrate the selfish behavior, we introduce the forwarding protocol which is based on social relations of nodes. We verify the proposed methods using simulation evaluations.