Incentive Mechanism for Data-Centric Message Delivery in Delay Tolerant Networks

A key issue in delay tolerant networks (DTN) is to find the right node to store and relay messages. We consider messages annotated with the unique keywords describing the message subject, and nodes also adds keywords to describe their mission interests, priority and their transient social relationship (TSR). To offset resource costs, an incentive mechanism is developed over transient social relationships which enrich enroute message content and motivate better semantically related nodes to carry and forward messages. The incentive mechanism ensures avoidance of congestion due to uncooperative or selfish behavior of nodes.