摘要：In Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs), nodes may be selfish and reluctant to expend their precious resources on forwarding messages for others. Therefore, an incentive scheme is necessary to motivate selfish nodes to cooperatively forward messages. However, the current incentive schemes mainly focus on encouraging nodes to participate in message forwarding, without considering the node congestion problem. When many messages are forwarded to the nodes with high connection degree, these nodes will become congested and deliberately discard messages, which will seriously degrade the routing performance and reduce the benefits of other nodes. To address this problem, we propose a credit-based congestion-aware incentive scheme (CBCAIS) for DTNs. In CBCAIS, a check and punishment mechanism is proposed to prevent forwarding nodes from deliberately discarding message. In addition, a message acceptance selection mechanism is proposed to allow the nodes to decide whether to accept other messages, according to self congestion degree. The experimental results show that CBCAIS can effectively stimulate selfish nodes to cooperatively forward messages, and achieve a higher message delivery ratio with lower overhead ratio, compared with other schemes.
