A replication dilemma game for cooperative data replication in ad hoc networks

In recent years wireless ad hoc networks have seen a great deal of attention, especially in cases where no infrastructure is available. These networks aim to provide good data accessibility for participants. Because of the wireless nodes' continuous movement, network partitioning occurs very often. In order to subside the negative effects of this partitioning and improve data accessibility and reliability, data is replicated in nodes other than the original owner of data. This duplication is costly in terms of nodes' storage space and energy. Hence, selfish nodes in an autonomous environment may act non-cooperatively and do not replicate data. In game theory literature this situation is referred to as a strategic situation. In order to address this problem we propose a game theory data replication scheme by using the repeated game concept and prove that it is in the nodes' best interest to cooperate fully in the replication process if our mechanism is used. Our analysis shows that our scheme outperforms previous methods in terms of data accessibility, communication cost and query delay.