ConSub: Incentive-based content subscribing in selfish opportunistic mobile networks

Recently, content-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub) services have become a significant research field in opportunistic mobile networks (OppNets). Pub/sub is an asynchronous messaging paradigm, in which content transmissions are guided by the interest. Since selfish behavior is common in reality, nodes often behave selfishly with an aim to maximize their own utilities without considering performance of other nodes. Therefore, how to encourage nodes to collect, store and share network content efficiently is one of the key challenges under this paradigm. In this paper, we propose an incentive-based pub/sub scheme, called ConSub, for OppNets. In ConSub, Tit-For-Tat (TFT) mechanism is employed to deal with selfish behavior. ConSub also implements a content exchange protocol between two interacting node, thus encouraging them to play as businessmen and carry contents to satisfy each other's interest. Specifically, the exchange order is determined by the content utility, which is calculated by contact probability and cooperation level between the current node and its neighbors subscribing to the interest. Extensive realistic trace-driven simulation results show that ConSub is superior to existing schemes in terms of delivered packets and transmission hops with reasonable transmission cost.