An incentive aware routing for selfish opportunistic networks: A game theoretic approach

Abstract

Many routing schemes in opportunistic networks (OPPNETs) assume that nodes are willing to forward messages to others. However, in practice, nodes in the networks may be selfish due to limited resources or poor social tie. Nodes' selfishness can be classified into individual selfishness and social selfishness. The existing works only consider how to solve the individual selfishness or social selfishness for data transmission respectively. But, the individual selfishness and social selfishness may co-exist in OPPNETs. In this paper, we propose an incentive aware routing for selfish OPPNETs from a game theoretic perspective, which jointly considers individual selfishness and social selfishness to improve the performance of OPPNETs. The scheme maps the message transmission between two nodes as a Rubinstein-Stahl bargaining game, which employs virtual currency and constructs proper price function, considering the nodes resources and the nodes' social ties for data transmission. Trace-driven simulations demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed incentive aware routing.