Performance Evaluation of Multicasting in Energy-Constrained DTN with Selfish Nodes

Due to the uncertainty of transmission opportunities between mobile nodes, Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) exploits the opportunistic forwarding mechanism. This mechanism requires nodes to forward messages in a cooperative and selfish way. However, in the real word, most of the nodes exhibit selfish behaviors such as individual and social selfishness. At the same time, the energy is usually limited in such networks. In this paper, we investigate how the selfish behaviors affect the performance of two-hop relaying multicast in energy-constrained DTN. We model the message delivery process under selfish behaviors and system energy constraint by a three- dimensional continuous time Markov chain. In terms of multicast performance, we investigate the average message transmission delay and transmission cost. Numerical results show that different selfish behaviors may have opposite impacts on different performance metrics in the energy-constrained DTN.