Cooperation in Delay-Tolerant Networks With Wireless Energy Transfer: Performance Analysis and Optimization

We consider a delay-tolerant network (DTN) whose mobile nodes are assigned to collect packets from data sources and deliver them to a sink (i.e., a gateway). Each mobile node operates by using energy transferred wirelessly from the gateway. For such a network, two main issues are studied. First, when a mobile node is at the data source, this node must decide on whether to accept the packet received from the data source or not. In contrast, whenever a mobile node is at the gateway, it has to decide on whether to transmit the packets collected from the data sources or to request wireless energy transfer. Second, multiple mobile nodes can cooperate and form coalitions to help one another in the delivery of packets from their associated data sources. However, this cooperation may not be always beneficial due to the limited buffer and energy resources. Moreover, some mobile nodes may secretly decide to deviate from a given coalition, thus taking advantage of the other innocent mobile nodes. To address these two issues, this paper introduces a performance analysis and optimization framework, which is based on a joint optimization and game-theoretic framework. The optimization model is used to obtain the packet delivery policy of each individual mobile node. Then, a novel game-theoretic model, namely a repeated coalition formation game, is developed to analyze the cooperation strategies of multiple mobile nodes.