A game-theoretic approach to stimulate cooperation for probabilistic routing in opportunistic networks

Opportunistic networking is an important technique to enable users to communicate in an environment where contemporaneous end-to-end paths are unavailable or unstable. To support end-to-end messaging in opportunistic networks, a number of probabilistic routing protocols have been proposed. However, when nodes are selfish, they may not have incentives to participate in probabilistic routing, and the system performance will degrade significantly. In this paper, we present novel incentive schemes for probabilistic routing that stimulates selfish nodes to participate. We not only rigorously prove the properties of our schemes, but also extensively evaluate our schemes using GloMoSim. Evaluation results show that there is an up to 75.8% gain in delivery ratio compared with a probabilistic routing protocol providing no incentive.