A peer-to-peer communication based content distribution protocol for incentive-aware delay tolerant networks

In the absence of Internet connectivity, a content-centric opportunistic network can be established by mobile human-held devices. However, to save battery, buffer, and bandwidth resources, device carriers may selfishly disable their delay-tolerant networking (DTN) application when communication is not desired. Consequently, the network performance will degrade as the majority of the data forwarding protocols for the DTNs are designed assuming cooperative relaying by nodes. To inculcate cooperation among the otherwise selfish communicating nodes, we propose an incentive-aware pricing game for interest-based social-aware forwarding in the DTNs. We formulate the pricing game between nodes as the Rubinstein Bargain model to enhance content distribution in DTNs. The communicating nodes decide the pricing and the cooperation level based on the following three parameters: (1) remaining battery level, (2) their social strength, and (3) message worth. Moreover, to enhance content distribution of large size messages in such networks, the proposed algorithm enables nodes to share information in a peer-to-peer fashion. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm effectively increases the distribution ratio of complete files, reduces their data delivery delays, and mitigates the selfish behavior of nodes.