Evolutionary forwarding games in Delay Tolerant Networks

In this paper, we apply evolutionary games to non-cooperative forwarding control of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). We focus our study on the probability to deliver a message from source to destination in a DTN using two-hop routing. We derive the success probability as a function of the competition within a large population of mobiles. In particular, for each message generated by a source, each mobile may take a decision that concerns the strategy by which the mobile participates to the relaying. A mobile that participates receives a unit of reward if it is the first to deliver a copy of the packet to the destination. A utility function is introduced as the difference between a reward unit and the energy cost. We show how the evolution dynamics and the equilibrium behavior (called Evolutionary Stable Strategy — ESS) are influenced by the characteristics of inter contact time, energy expenditure and pricing characteristics. We specialize our analysis also to mechanisms that the source may introduce in order to have the message delivered to the destination with high probability within a given deadline.