Epidemic Oracle: an approach to boost security and performance of delay tolerant networks

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) play a vital role in disaster response to
address intermittent connectivity, in particular when Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to relay critical information. However, most
existing DTN protocols are highly susceptible to Denial-of-Service (DoS)
attacks because their flooding-based or simplistic routing decisions can be
exploited by malicious nodes to quickly saturate buffers, exhausting
network resources and disrupting legitimate traffic. This paper presents an
Epidemic Oracle (EO) implementation, to mitigate DoS threats by
intelligently removing delivered messages from all buffers, thus reducing
overhead and freeing network resources. Through extensive simulation in the
ONE environment, EO is evaluated against three established encounter-based
DTN protocols-Epidemic, Spray and Wait, and Spray and Wait Binary-under
varying buffer sizes, transmission speeds, and both aggressive and stealthy
DoS attacks. The findings indicate that EO substantially increases delivery
ratios while curtailing buffer congestion, even under severe adversarial
conditions. These improvements highlight the potential of oracle-based
interventions to bolster performance in UAV-assisted disaster scenarios,
paving the way for more resilient and efficient DTNs in emergency
communications.