Abstract: The existing authentication schemes have the problem of heave calculation and communication overhead in the large-scale delay tolerant network. This paper proposes an authentication scheme for large-scale delay tolerant networks. An efficient hierarchical identity based signature is proposed, which has less overhead compared with the existing schemes and has the aggregate verification property. Based on the proposed signature, an authentication scheme is constructed. A batch authentication is also proposed based on the aggregate verification properties of the signature. The signature and scheme prove to be secure under the h-wDBDHI* and ECDDH assumption. The analysis and simulation show that the authentication overhead and successful rate of this scheme are both better than the existing schemes. The scheme is more suitable for the large-scale delay tolerant networks.