An Incentive-Compatible Routing Protocol for Two-Hop Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) rely on the mobility of nodes and their contacts to make up with the lack of continuous connectivity and, thus, enable message delivery from source to destination in a “store-carry-forward” fashion. Since message delivery consumes resource such as storage and power, some nodes may choose not to forward or carry others' messages while relying on others to deliver their locally generated messages. These kinds of selfish behaviors may hinder effective communications over DTNs. In this paper, we present an efficient incentive-compatible (IC) routing protocol (ICRP) with multiple copies for two-hop DTNs based on the algorithmic game theory. It takes both the encounter probability and transmission cost into consideration to deal with the misbehaviors of selfish nodes. Moreover, we employ the optimal sequential stopping rule and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction as a strategy to select optimal relay nodes to ensure that nodes that honestly report their encounter probability and transmission cost can maximize their rewards. We attempt to find the optimal stopping time threshold adaptively based on realistic probability model and propose an algorithm to calculate the threshold. Based on this threshold, we propose a new method to select relay nodes for multicopy transmissions. To ensure that the selected relay nodes can receive their rewards securely, we develop a signature scheme based on a bilinear map to prevent the malicious nodes from tampering. Through simulations, we demonstrate that ICRP can effectively stimulate nodes to forward/carry messages and achieve higher packet delivery ratio with lower transmission cost.

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