CAIS: A Copy Adjustable Incentive Scheme in Community-Based Socially Aware Networking

Abstract

Socially aware networking (SAN) is a new communication paradigm, in which the social characteristics of mobile nodes are exploited to improve the performance of data distribution. In SAN, mobile carriers may exhibit selfish behaviors and refuse to relay messages for others for various reasons, such as limited resources (e.g., buffer, energy, and bandwidth) or social relationships. Several incentive schemes have recently been investigated to stimulate selfish users for cooperation in data forwarding. However, a majority of the existing methods have not fully studied nodes' social relationships in their selfish behaviors. In this paper, we propose a copy adjustable incentive scheme (CAIS), which adopts the virtual credit concept to stimulate selfish nodes to cooperate in data forwarding. In CAIS, we consider a network in which the nodes are divided into certain communities based on their social relationships. Then, we apply two types of credits, i.e., social credit and nonsocial credit, to reward the nodes when they relay data for other nodes inside their community or outsiders, respectively. Based on our mechanism, the number of messages a node can replicate to other nodes is adjusted according to its cooperation level and earned credits. To further improve the performance of CAIS, a single-copy data replication policy is employed, which manages the credit distribution of each node according to its available resources. The results of our extensive experiments using both synthetic and trace-driven simulations illustrate that CAIS copes well with node selfishness in community-based networks and outperforms other benchmark protocols with high data delivery ratio, low communication overhead, and short data delivery latency.