An Equivalent Exchange Based Data Forwarding Incentive Scheme for Socially Aware Networks

As nodes have limited resources in the socially aware networks, they will have strong selfish behaviors, such as not forwarding messages and losing packets, which will lead to poor network performance. Thus, an equivalent-exchange-based data forwarding incentive scheme (EEIS) will be proposed in this paper. It is main that messages forwarding will be abstracted into a transaction in EEIS. The buyer and seller respectively make a price about the message according to its own resource state and negotiate twice the pricing both side until they agree, then the buyer will send the message and pay a certain virtual currency to the seller. Otherwise, the next message will continue to be traded. Meanwhile, both parties' resource status, wealth status and the price of messages must be open and transparent to prevent the nodes from making false pricing during the transaction. Ultimately, the experimental results show the delivery ratio about messages is improved significantly and verify the effectiveness of EEIS.

Automated summary

Nodes in socially aware networks exhibit selfish behaviors, affecting network performance. Therefore, an equivalent-exchange-based data forwarding incentive scheme (EEIS) is proposed, which improves message delivery ratio through pricing and trading mechanisms.