Credit-based Repeated Game Model Applied in Transfer Decision of Opportunistic Network

Abstract

Because of the characteristic of network topology and application domain, the data transmission in opportunistic network depends on the ‘Store-Transfer’ operation between nodes in it. And there isn’t the fix route or path in it. So the fitness transmitter-node choice is a key for the success of data transmission in network. But the decision-making for transmission is not an easy work. As a smart unit, the nodes do cheating operations for avoiding accept the data transmitter job. To reduce such cheating behavior of nodes, the idea of credit-cooperation and repeated games are involved. For a node, every game is considered as a part of repeated-game in its lifecycle. If it did a cheating-operation in a game, it would face the punishment with long time. And the profit gained from the cheating-operation would be counteracted mutually from the loss of punishment time. Moreover, usually the punishment is bigger than profits in fact. By such method, it minimizes the probability of cheating happened in the game theory and makes the game more efficient.