Abstract: Due to the limited resources such as bandwidth, buffer, energy, and so on, most delay tolerant networks (DTNs) nodes are selfish and do not forward messages for other nodes to save their precious resources, which seriously degrades the routing performance. To stimulate the DTNs selfish nodes to cooperatively forward messages and reduce the message delivery delay, this paper proposes a virtual currency-based incentive-aware low delay routing algorithm, called VCILDR. A delay-based currency payment and allocation strategy is established to encourage selfish nodes to forward messages for other nodes in VCILDR. In this way, the direct beneficial messages are forwarded to the nodes with lower delivery delay and mutually beneficial messages are exchanged at the same time. A bargaining game model of alternating offers is established to determine the exchanged mutually beneficial messages. In addition, a greedy algorithm for solving the model’s subgame perfect equilibrium is proposed in this paper. Extensive simulations are carried out on real-world dataset to verify the performance of this incentive-aware low delay routing. The experimental results show that the proposed routing can effectively stimulate DTNs selfish nodes to cooperatively forward messages for others, reduce the message delivery delay and improve the message delivery success ratio at the same time.

Key words: delay tolerant networks (DTNs), incentive-aware, selfish, virtual currency, bargaining game