Incentive based data sharing in delay tolerant mobile networks

Mobile wireless devices play important roles in our daily life, e.g., users often use such devices to take pictures and share with friends via opportunistic peer-to-peer links, which however are intermittent in nature, and hence require the store-and-forward feature proposed in Delay Tolerant Networks to provide useful data sharing opportunities. Moreover, mobile devices may not be willing to forward data items to other devices due to the limited resources. Hence, effective data dissemination schemes need to be designed to encourage nodes to collaboratively share data. We propose a Multi-Receiver Incentive-Based Dissemination (MuRIS) scheme that allows nodes to cooperatively deliver information of interest to one another via chosen paths utilizing few transmissions. Our scheme exploits local historical paths and users' interests information maintained by each node. In addition, the charge and rewarding functions incorporated within our scheme stimulate cooperation among nodes such that the nodes have no incentive to launch edge insertion attacks. Furthermore, our charge and rewarding functions are designed such that the chosen delivery paths mimic efficient multicast tree that results in fewer delivery hops. Extensive simulation studies using real human contact-based mobility traces show that our scheme outperforms existing methods in terms of delivery ratio and transmission efficiency.