Credit-Based Incentive Data Dissemination in Mobile Social Networks

Data dissemination is a challenging issue in mobile social networks. It aims at increasing the overall delivery ratio and reducing the overall delivery delay. Most of the existing works assume all the users in a network are cooperative, i.e., the users are willing to carry the messages that they are not interested in while the nodes they meet maybe. In reality, the behaviors of each individual are naturally selfish, especially when the resources they have and they can access are limited. A data dissemination protocol cannot be pragmatic unless the selfishness is considered. This work proposes an incentive scheme to stimulate the users in a network to be more cooperative. Credits are the stimulus to encourage users to be more cooperative for data dissemination. We evaluate each node’s ability to fetch messages of a specific kind of interest and every single user can rent other nodes to help with obtaining the interested messages by paying credits. Extensive simulations on real traces are carried out to evaluate the proposed incentive scheme.