A game-theoretic approach to advertisement dissemination in ephemeral networks

Abstract

In ephemeral networks, disseminating advertisements faces two dilemmatic problems: on the one hand, disseminators own the limited resources and have privacy concerns, thus, often preferring to avoid disseminating advertisements without enough incentives; Even if advertisements are disseminated, their dissemination accuracy is lower. On the other hand, false advertisements may flood in ephemeral networks if too many incentives but no punishments are given. Thus, it is a challenge to design an effective scheme to guarantee rational disseminators have sufficient impetus to forward true advertisements to the interested consumers and report false advertisements, despite facing the limitation of resources and the risk of privacy leakage. To solve this problem, in this paper, a bargaining-based scheme is proposed to motive disseminators to forward the true advertisements to the interested node and a semi-grim policy is designed for punishing the disseminators who releases and disseminates false advertisements. Acknowledging the assumption of incomplete information, a repeated dissemination game is proposed to help disseminators to decide whether to forward advertisements or report false advertisements. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme not only provides disseminators a strong impetus to disseminate the advertisements with higher dissemination accuracy, but also effectively prevents disseminators from forwarding false advertisements.