Incentive driven information sharing in delay tolerant mobile networks

Mobile wireless devices (e.g., smartphones, PDAs, and notebooks) play important roles in our daily life, e.g., users often use such devices for bank transactions, keep in touch with friends. Users can also store such information and share with one another via opportunistic peer to peer links. However, peer to peer links are opportunistic links which are intermittent in nature and hence require the store-and-forward feature proposed in Delay Tolerant Networks to provide useful data sharing opportunities. Moreover, due to the limited resources, e.g., communication bandwidth and battery consumption, mobile devices can be selfish and may not be willing to forward data items to other devices that are interested in such items. Hence, effective data dissemination schemes need to be designed to encourage nodes to collaboratively share data. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Receiver Incentive-Based Dissemination (MuRIS) scheme that allows nodes to cooperatively deliver information of interest to one another via chosen delivery paths that utilize few transmissions. Our MuRIS scheme utilizes local historical path and tracks users´ interests information maintained by each node. In addition, the charge and reward functions incorporated within our MuRIS scheme stimulate cooperation among nodes such that the nodes have no incentive to launch edge insertion attacks. Furthermore, our charge and reward functions are designed such that the chosen delivery paths mimic efficient multicast tree that results in fewest delivery hops. Extensive simulation studies using real human contact-based mobility traces show that our MuRIS scheme outperforms existing methods in terms of delivery ratio and transmission efficiency.