Analyzing behavioral selfishness in opportunistic environment using game theory

Abstract

Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) or Opportunistic Networks are mobile networks, where there may not exist connectivity of nodes all the time. In view of the limited connectivity, DTNs rely upon the store-carry-and-forward approach for communication with each other. The efficiency of DTN routing protocol relies on the intelligent selection of a relay node from a set of encountering nodes. Most of the researchers have paid attention to relay selection while developing routing protocols ignoring node behavior, which will also have an impact of the routing performance. This is because, the main focus lies in developing an intelligent forwarding strategy so, they assume that all the nodes are altruistic in nature and cooperative with each other. However, we have studied the behavior of DTN nodes and found experimentally that not all the nodes will behave rationally and in a cooperative manner. Such non-cooperating behavior of nodes will affect the routing performance. So, we have used a game theoretic approach to make the nodes cooperative and thereby improving the routing performance metrics. We have analyzed the Prophet routing algorithm for our study and the experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better routing objectives in terms of delivery ratio, overhead ratio and delivery delay.