BiRep: A Reputation Scheme to Mitigate the Effects of Black-Hole Nodes in Delay-Tolerant Internet of Vehicles

Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) enables communication in disruptive scenarios where issues such as sparse and intermittent connectivity, long and variable delays, high latency, high error rates, or no end-to-end connectivity exist. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a network of the future in which integration between devices, vehicles, and users will be unlimited and universal, overcoming the heterogeneity of systems, services, applications, and devices. Delay-tolerant internet of vehicles (DT-IoV) is emerging and becoming a popular research topic due to the critical applications that can be realized, such as software or map update dissemination. For an IoV to work efficiently, a degree of cooperation between nodes is necessary to deliver messages to their destinations. However, nodes might misbehave and silently drop messages, also known as a black-hole attack, degrading network performance. Various solutions have been proposed to deal with black-hole nodes, but most are centralized or require each node to meet every other node. This paper proposes a decentralized reputation scheme called BiRep that identifies and punishes black-hole nodes in DT-IoV. BiRep is tested on the Prophet routing protocol. Simulation results show excellent performance in all scenarios, comparable or better to other reputation schemes, significantly increasing the delivery ratio of messages.