Integrating In-Network Computing for Secure and Efficient Cascaded Delivery in DTNs

Abstract

Delay tolerant networks can facilitate communication in the aftermath of disasters and emergency situations. However, the routing of messages between the nodes in such sparsely connected networks could be challenging. There have been many algorithms proposed to increase the delivery likelihood of messages while staying in the limitations of such challenged environments. In almost all of these studies, the routing problem has been considered between a source and destination pair. However, the communication between different source-destination pairs may be correlated and the delivery of one message may trigger another message routing process (e.g., a response back or separate message to another node). In this paper, we study such a cascaded delivery process in delay tolerant networks, in which there is a chain of source-destination pairs that are connected in terms of their message generation. We utilize a multi-copy based routing scheme and propose integrating in-network computing at relay nodes in order to achieve an efficient routing scheme with increased delivery ratio and reduced delay without increasing the number of message forwardings. Moreover, to address the potential privacy issues, we also utilize homomorphic encryption based computations. We evaluate the proposed scheme via simulations and show that it can improve the routing performance without releasing the content of intermediate messages to unintended destinations.