Stackelberg Game Based Incentive Mechanism for Data Transmission in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

摘要

Mobile opportunistic networks (MONs) can utilize the random contacts among nodes to deliver data, which is a crucial complement of the traditional infrastructure-based communications. However, due to the limited resource and the issues of security and privacy, the selfishness of nodes proves to bring severe negative impact on the data transmission for MONs. Therefore, how to motivate nodes to contribute their transmission capacity turns to be an important topic. Because of the time-varying trait of MONs, it is challenging to incent selfish nodes to help others, because it is hard to control the data forwarding process and the corresponding cost. In this paper, we propose a Stackelberg game based incentive mechanism for data dissemination in MONs, which realizes the optimal resource allocation, including the task assignment and pricing of data forwarding for the relays. In addition, we analyze the existence of the equilibrium state, which theoretically presents some requirements of parameter setting for real deployment of our mechanism. In the end, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism.