Delay Tolerant Networks in partially overlapped networks: A non-cooperative game

Epidemic forwarding protocol in Delay Tolerant Networks maximizes successful data delivery probability but at the same time incurs high costs in terms of redundancy of packet copies in the system and energy consumption. Two-hop routing on the other hand minimizes the packet flooding and the energy costs but degrades the delivery probability. This paper presents a framework to achieve a tradeoff between the successful data delivery probability and the energy costs. Each mobile has to decide which routing protocol it wants to use for packet delivering. In such a problem, we consider a non-cooperative game theory approach. We explore the scenario where the source and the destination mobiles are enclosed in two different regions, which are partially overlapped. We study the impact of the proportion of the surface covered by both regions on the Nash equilibrium and price of anarchy. We also design a fully distributed algorithm that can be employed for convergence to the Nash equilibrium. This algorithm does not require any knowledge of some parameter of the system as the number of mobiles or the rate of contacts between mobiles.