A cooperation scheme based on reputation for opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networks utilize the communication opportunities arising from node movement to forward messages. So the reliability of message transmission between nodes is non-guaranteed and depends on the intermediate nodes. However, in most cases, the intermediate nodes of a network are resource-constrained or capability-restricted, so these nodes are selfish and do not want to supply storing and forwarding service for other nodes. In this paper, we propose a scheme to discourage the selfish behavior based on the reputation. Moreover, we build a game theory model to analyze the effectiveness of our scheme. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme indeed stimulates the cooperation of nodes.