Encounter record reduction scheme based on theoretical contact probability for flooding attack mitigation in DTN

Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is characterized by a lack of end-to-end connectivity. Due to this, detecting flooding attack in DTN is a challenging and important task. Among several schemes against flooding attack in DTN, the scheme using Encounter Record (ER) that consists of past transmission history of each node is gathering attention. Since ER entries are exchanged between nodes, a node can detect an attacker whose transmission rate is too much. Although an attacker may falsify entry to pretend that his/her transmission rate is less than the actual value, it can also be detected through the contradiction between a falsified entry and another entry. However, since a node sends all ER entries in its own buffer regardless of whether an entry is helpful to detect an attacker or not, the energy consumption increases as the number of entries increases. In this paper, we propose an ER reduction scheme based on theoretical contact probability for flooding attack mitigation. We focus on the fact that if the falsified entry does not exist, corresponding entries are not helpful to detect an attacker. Since the falsified entries are propagated over the network with the lapse of time, the probability that there is no contradicting entries over the network gets higher if a node has not received any contradicting entries for a sufficient time. By removing such entries, the energy consumption can be reduced while the effectiveness of ER is kept. By computer simulation, we demonstrate our scheme successfully reduce the energy consumption while the same level of performance is achieved.