A coalitional-game-based incentive mechanism for content caching in heterogeneous Delay Tolerant Networks

In recent years, Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have successfully presented as a possible extension of the Internet architecture in order to provide communication support to existing networks. However, these networks have a major issue which is the coordination among relays. In this work, we study the cooperative transmission for DTNs using coalitional game theory. We design a new incentive mechanism for heterogeneous system to induce coordination among DTN relays. In particular, we focus on the source packet dissemination to a destination using tow-hop relaying scheme, considering networks resource constraints: the relay buffer, the packet life time, and the energy consumption according to the mobile technologies. Rational mobiles are organized into separate coalition structures to meet a trade off between the source reward and the energy conservation. We discus the Nash equilibria for our game and the stable strategy state in which no mobile can get a higher payoff through changing unilaterally its coalition. Then, we use the distributed imitative Boltzmann-Gibbs learning algorithm enabling relays to learn the Nash equilibrium strategy; grand coalition. The improvement of the global system performance is examined, and a comparison between different inter-node collaboration states is presented. © 2015 IEEE.