A College Admissions Game for Content Caching in Heterogeneous Delay Tolerant Networks

In recent years, Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have been 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 paper, we propose a novel mechanism source-relay association approach for heterogeneous DTNs that exploits the information about the history and predictability of the relay nodes while also we focus on the source packet dissemination to a destination using tow-hop relaying scheme, considering network resource constraints: the relay buffer, the packet life time, and the energy consumption according to the mobile technologies. We formulate the problem as a college admissions game in which a number of colleges, i.e., data source seek to recruit a number of students, i.e., relays nodes. In this game, the data source and relays nodes rank one another based on preference functions that capture the data sources need to optimize their utilities which are functions of packet success rate and delay. We propose a novel distributed algorithm that leads to a stable matching among data sources and relays nodes. We show that the proposed approach can yields the better performance improvement of the traffic among the source and destination node.