Incentive-aware data dissemination in delay-tolerant mobile networks

This work centers on data dissemination in delay-tolerant mobile networks, where data fall into a range of interest types and each node may have one or multiple interests. The goal is to deliver data messages from sources to nodes with corresponding interests. We consider selfish nodes with rational behavior, and propose a credit-based incentive scheme to promote nodal collaboration. The key challenge is to effectively track the value of a message under such a unique network setting with intermittent connectivity and multiple interest types. Given poor end-to-end connections, credits are rewarded to the final deliverer only. Thus the value of a message for an intermediate node highly depends on its probability to deliver the message. Such probability itself is nontrivial to estimate. Moreover, a message is usually desired by multiple mobile users. Therefore, it can be potentially “sold” multiple times to different receivers. On the other hand, while more than one copies can be created during the transmissions of a message, a particular receiver “pays” for the first received copy only. These characteristics together make the development of incentive mechanism a unique, interesting, and challenging problem. In this paper, we present effective schemes to estimate the expected credit reward, and formulate nodal communication as a two-person cooperative game, whose solution is found by using the Nash Theorem. Extensive simulations are carried out based on real-world traces to evaluate the proposed scheme in terms of data delivery rate, delay and overhead. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that incorporates incentive stimulation into data dissemination in delay-tolerant mobile networks with selfish nodes and multiple interest types.