An Incentive Mechanism Based on Bertrand Game for Opportunistic Edge Computing

In a real edge network, many nodes may be selfish and unwilling to forward messages for other nodes. In this case, an incentive mechanism is needed to encourage the selfish nodes to participate in message forwarding. In this paper, we analyze the interaction between the source node and the relay node in edge opportunistic networks, and propose an incentive mechanism based on game theory to encourage the cooperation between nodes. Firstly, we define the interaction steps between the source and the relay node, which include that the source node decides the price of forwarding a message, the relay node responses the forwarding plan to the source node, and all nodes can get reward for their participant in message forwarding. We provide two-stage incentives to nodes, that is, the nodes can get reward from both receiving and forwarding messages. Since the nodes may be selfish, both the source node and the relay node want to maximize their utilities. Then, we model the cooperation between the source and the relay node as Bertrand Game, and the utility functions of the source and the relay node are defined. Furthermore, we find that the Nash Equilibrium is existed and unique, and present the best pricing scheme for the source node and the best forwarding plan for the relay node. The simulation results show that the proposed incentive mechanism can encourage the cooperation between selfish nodes, and improve the performance of routing algorithm in terms of delivery ratio and delay.