A message-based incentive mechanism for opportunistic networking applications

In the recent years, the research community proposed several protocols and applications for opportunistic networking. A common assumption is that all nodes have pro social behavior and are willing to cooperate with the network. However, in opportunistic networking applications, this assumption can lead to degradations in the network performance. People can be selfish and this behavior affects the operation of the network. In this work, we propose an incentive mechanism to improve routing, called MINEIRO, which aims to detect and avoid selfish nodes based on the source of the messages. We demonstrate under which constraints our algorithm leads to Bayesian equilibrium. Moreover, we show that without an incentive mechanism the network supports up to 60% of nodes with selfish behavior without performance degradation in a random mobility scenario. Meanwhile, in a scenario with social-based mobility, the performance decreases linearly for more than 20% of selfish nodes. Our proposal, on the other hand, improves the performance with any amount of selfish nodes by encouraging users to relay messages from third-parties.