IRONMAN: Using Social Networks to Add Incentives and Reputation to Opportunistic Networks

Opportunistic networks enable users to communicate in the absence of network infrastructure. But forwarding messages in such a network incurs costs for nodes in terms of energy and storage. This may lead to nodes being selfish and not forwarding messages for other nodes, resulting in degraded network performance. This paper presents a novel incentive mechanism for opportunistic networks that uses pre-existing social-network information to detect and punish selfish nodes, incentivising them to participate in the network. Trace-driven simulations demonstrate that our mechanism performs better than existing mechanisms, and that social-network information can also be used to improve existing incentive mechanisms.