An evolutionary bargaining‐based approach for incentivized cooperation in opportunistic networks

Abstract

SummaryOpportunistic networking enables users to communicate in an environment where connectivity is intermittent or unstable. However, such networking scheme assumes that mobile nodes voluntary cooperate, which cannot be guaranteed. Some nodes can simply exhibit selfish behavior and thus diminish the effectiveness of the approach. In this paper, a game scenario is formulated in which the nodes try to convince each other to participate in packets forwarding. Each node is considered as a player in this game. When a node comes in the communication range of another, a bargaining game starts between them as part of the message forwarding process. Both players try to have a mutual agreement on a price for message forwarding. We present a new incentive mechanism called evolutionary bargaining‐based incentive scheme (EBIS) to motivate selfish nodes to cooperate in data forwarding. In EBIS, a node negotiates with other nodes to obtain an agreeable amount of credit for its forwarding service. Nodes apply a sequential bargaining game and then adapt their strategies using an evolutionary model to maximize the probability of reaching an agreement. Unlike classical bargaining games, nodes in our model are boundedly rational. In addition, we use the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) concept to determine the adaptive strategies for the nodes. The comparison of EBIS with a benchmarked model demonstrates that EBIS performs better in terms of packet delivery ratio and average latency.