On the Design of a Reward-Based Incentive Mechanism for Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

A central problem in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) is to persuade mobile nodes to participate in relaying messages. Indeed, the delivery of a message incurs a certain number of costs for a relay. We consider a twohop DTN in which a source node, wanting to get its message across to the destination as fast as possible, promises each relay it meets a reward. This reward is the minimum amount that offsets the expected delivery cost, as estimated by the relay from the information given by the source (number of existing copies of the message, age of these copies). A reward is given only to the relay that is the first one to deliver the message to the destination. We show that under fairly weak assumptions the expected reward the source pays remains the same irrespective of the information it conveys, provided that the type of information does not vary dynamically over time. On the other hand, the source can gain by adapting the information it conveys to a meeting relay. For the particular cases of two relays or exponentially distributed inter-contact times, we give some structural results of the optimal adaptive policy.Index terms -delay tolerant networks, reward incentive mechanism, adaptive strategy *

Addressing the Issue of Routing Unfairness in Opportunistic Backhaul Networks for Collecting Sensed Data

“…Mechanisms have been proposed to detect and relieve congested devices [25], cooperation of selfish users is motivated by incentive schemes (e.g., [26,27]), and energy awareness (e.g., [28,29]) considers the battery level of devices during routing. Despite these studies, failure to address routing unfairness leaves a gap to be filled in OppNets for sensed data collection.…”

Incentive-Rewarding Mechanisms to Stimulate Participation in Heterogeneous DTNs

“…The heterogeneity also gives rise to a richer set of structures of information sharing from which the source can choose from, and its analysis involves an application of results on order statistics [9]. When the source meets a relay, it has now four options of information sharing strategies, as opposed to the three discussed in [18]. 1) full information: the source reveals to the relay the number and the age of all existing copies of the message in the network.…”

“…The mechanism investigated in this paper is a generalization of the one studied in [18] in which the relay nodes were assumed to be homogeneous with identical statistical model of mobility. Motivated by the fact that a realistic mobility is heterogeneous [4], we generalize the results in [18] to heterogenous DTN network where different pairs of nodes might meet at different rates.…”

A Mixed Strategy for a Competitive Game in Delay Tolerant Networks

“…A central issue in DTNs is therefore to convince mobile nodes to relay messages. Many incentive mechanisms have been proposed to avoid the free-rider problem in DTNs, including reputationbased schemes [12,16,[22][23][24], barter-based schemes [4,5,20] and credit-based schemes [7,8,14,19,25,26]. In contrast to most of the incentive mechanisms proposed in the literature, explicit guarantees on the probability of message delivery and on the mean time to deliver a message have been obtained for the credit-based scheme considered in [17,18] (see also [19] for a closely-related mechanism).…”