Resilience and opportunistic forwarding: beyond average value analysis

Opportunistic networks are systems with highly distributed operation, relying on the altruistic cooperation of heterogeneous, and not always software- and hardware-compatible user nodes. Moreover, the absence of central control makes them vulnerable to malicious attacks. In this paper, we take a fresh look at the resilience of opportunistic forwarding to these challenges. In particular, we introduce and promote the use of metric envelopes as a resilience assessment tool. Metric envelopes depart from the standard practice of average value analysis and explicitly account for the differentiated impact that a challenge may have on the forwarding performance due to node heterogeneity (device capabilities, mobility) and attackers' intelligence. The use of metric envelopes is demonstrated in the case of three challenges: jamming, hardware/software failures and incompatibilities, and free-riding phenomena. For each challenge, we first devise heuristics to generate worst- and best-case realization scenarios that can approximate the metric envelopes. Then we derive the envelopes of common performance metrics for three popular forwarding protocols under a comprehensive range of mobility patterns. The metric envelope approach enables more informed choices in opportunistic forwarding whenever network resilience considerations become important.