Incentive Schemes for Data Collaboration in Disruption Tolerant Networks

Publish-Subscribe models proposed for Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTNs) assume cooperation among all nodes in the network. Although, this is a valid assumption for some networks, recent applications envisioned for DTNs involve user participation of selfish nodes that form the network. In such scenarios, users may not participate in forwarding subscriptions or the message itself if they are not interested in the content. To alleviate the selfish behavior of such nodes we propose to use incentive based data collaboration schemes. Our paper examines distributed incentive based schemes that encourage participation of selfish nodes in forwarding of messages from publishers to subscribers. We provide simulation results that show the benefit of intermediate node participation. We also demonstrate our schemes through a prototype implementation of the publish-subscribe framework in a DTN environment.