Incentive jamming-based secure routing in decentralized Internet of Things

This article focuses on the secure routing problem in the decentralized Internet of Things (IoT). We consider a typical decentralized IoT scenario composed of peer legitimate devices, unauthorized devices (eavesdroppers), and selfish helper jamming devices (jammers), and propose a novel incentive jamming-based secure routing scheme. For a pair of source and destination, we first provide theoretical modeling to reveal how the transmission security performance of a given route is related to the jamming power of jammers in the IoT. Then, we design an incentive mechanism with which the source pays some rewards to stimulate the artificial jamming among selfish jammers, and also develop a two-stage Stackelberg game framework to determine the optimal source rewards and jamming power. Finally, with the help of the theoretical modeling as well as the source rewards and jamming power setting results, we formulate a shortest weighted path-finding problem to identify the optimal route for secure data delivery between the source-destination pair, which can be solved by employing the Dijkstra’s or Bellman-Ford algorithm. We prove that the proposed routing scheme is individually rational, stable, distributed, and computationally efficient. Simulation and numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of our routing scheme.