An Incentive-Based Scheme for Mitigating Node Selfishness in Smart Opportunistic Mobile Networks

Smart Opportunistic Mobile Networks (SoMNs) are sparse mobile networks in which there may not exist complete end-to-end path between a pair of nodes. In view of the limited connectivity, SoMNs uses store-carry-and-forward approach for message forwarding. The study of behavior of nodes in such networks have been considered as a promising research area by many of the researchers. Due to limited resources and frequent network disconnections, nodes may not always behave rationally and in a cooperative manner for message forwarding. Some of the nodes may act selfishly due to want of resources, such as buffer space or energy, and reluctant to forward the message further in the network, which will degrade the overall routing performance. In this paper, we have proposed an incentive-based scheme to achieve cooperation among nodes by forming coalitions and stimulating the selfish nodes with reward points to actively participate in message forwarding. The proposed scheme uses coalitional game theory for relay selection and Shapley value for distributing the total reward points generated by the coalition among nodes. Experimental results using both synthetic and real-world traces show that the proposed method outperforms some of the existing protocols by in terms of higher delivery ratio, lower overhead ratio, lower delivery delay and lower energy dissipation.