Self-Interest-Driven incentives for ad dissemination in autonomous mobile social networks

In this paper, we propose a Self-Interest-Driven (SID) incentive scheme to stimulate cooperation among selfish nodes for ad dissemination in autonomous mobile social networks. As a key innovation of SID, we introduce “virtual checks” to eliminate the needs of accurate knowledge about whom and how many credits ad provider should pay. A virtual check is included in each ad packet. When an intended receiver receives the packet for the first time from an intermediate node, the former authorizes the latter a digitally signed check, which serves as a proof of successful ad delivery. Multiple copies of a virtual check can be created and signed by different receivers. When a node that owns a signed check meets the ad provider, it requests the provider to cash the check. Both ad packets and signed checks can be traded among mobile nodes. We propose the effective mechanisms to define virtual rewards for ad packets and virtual checks, and formulate the nodal interaction as a two-player cooperative game, whose solution is obtained by the Nash Bargaining Theorem. Extensive simulations are carried out to compare SID with other existing incentive algorithms under real world mobility traces.