TSCO: Trust-based secure and cooperative opportunistic resource utilization networks

An opportunistic resource utilization network (denoted as Oppnet) is a type of network that enables its node to cooperate in an opportunistic and ad hoc manner. Cooperation in oppnet includes sharing node computational resources, rather than only opportunistic communication in the traditional opportunistic networks. The key idea of oppnet is its ability to grow from seed node (initiator) to expanded oppnet via joining more nodes until getting the desired resources in a timely manner. This expansion raises the security risk of joining malicious nodes and threatens the oppnet including nodes and data. Besides, uncontrolled oppnet expansion might allow joining nodes with low computational capabilities or limited resources that have delayed responses, and hence affect the performance of oppnet. This study aims to mitigate these two problems by proposing a new oppnet paradigm (an enhanced version of original oppnet) called Trust-based Secure Cooperative Oppnet (TSCO) that utilizing a trust as a foundation for security and cooperation. Trust foundation is the major aspect of TSCO, which relies mainly on establishing trust value for each oppnet node and updating these values based on cooperation experience with those nodes. In TSCO, oppnet nodes have classified based on their trust values in which the highest trust value has the priority to join oppnet, if it exists within the specific range. Otherwise, the second-highest trust value takes priority, and so on. To test the feasibility of TSCO in realistic systems, a framework of using TSCO as an oppnet expansion control regarding security and cooperation is simulated. The experimental results show that TSCO has a better performance in terms of secure, success expansion, and cooperation. The success rate of TSCO is higher than the success rate of the original oppnet (our experimental baseline). In addition, regarding the time of satisfying oppnet tasks, TSCO shows less average latency than the baseline.