A Novel Game Based Incentive Strategy for Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks are a emerging networks characterized by frequent network partitions, high bit error ratio and random topology instability, where the message propagation depends on the cooperation of nodes to fulfill a "store-carry-forward" fashion. Due to the constrained energy, memory and processing capacity, some individual nodes may behave selfishly, or even maliciously, which will introduce damage into the existing routing schemes based on cooperation and degrade the performance (lower delivery ratio, longer latency etc.,) of opportunistic networks greatly. In order to address the above issues, the current price-based incentive strategy, Credit relies on a fixed management-center which is rare in the realistic opportunistic networks with little infrastructure to manage the transaction that the source of messages pays virtual credits to nodes that relay messages for it. So this paper proposes a novel Game based Incentive Strategy (GIS) which utilizes three-time bargaining model based on two-person transaction and allows the sending nodes to pay the relay nodes directly according to the optimal price drawn by game without any third party. GIS stimulates the cooperation of selfish nodes to forward messages effectively, while holds back the deceptive price stemmed from the malicious intermediary nodes to facilitate deals. From the extensive simulations results, GIS can optimize the average latency and the delivery ratio to the greatest extent. Additionally, effectiveness and fairness can be guaranteed.