An economic model for resource exchange in mobile peer to peer networks

Consider an urban area with hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Drivers and passengers in these vehicles are interested in information relevant to their trip. For example, a driver would like his/her vehicle to continuously display on a map the available parking spaces around the current location. Or, the driver may be interested in the traffic conditions (e.g. average speed) one mile ahead. In this paper we examine the dissemination of information about resources in mobile peer-to-peer networks, where vehicles and sensors communicate with each other via short-range wireless transmission. Each disseminated resource represents information about a spatial-temporal event, such as the availability of a parking slot at a particular time. We propose an opportunistic dissemination paradigm, in which a moving object transmits the resources it carries to encountered vehicles and obtains new resources in exchange. We develop and analyze a family of economic models that provide incentive for collaboration in data dissemination. The proposed system has the potential to create a completely new information marketplace.