Privacy-preserving history-based routing in Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) are a subset of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) in which mobile nodes negotiate connectivity via short-range wireless communication. Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), i.e. smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc., and wearable smart devices that are capable of data communication, more often are considered as nodes of an OppNet. Each node is programmed to record the location of other nodes which are visited and creates a history table over time of these interactions. For node to node communication, messages are exchanged opportunistically with the aim of progressing the message towards the intended destination node. To send a message from a sender node to the final receiver node, the optimized route, composed of different nodes is identified by inspecting the history table, which has been created by each node based on previous interactions. Therefore, history table security is a must to prevent leaking of data or privacy and integrity compromise. In this paper, a new Privacy-Preserving History-Based (PPHB) routing mechanism is proposed based on historical location tracking.