FollowMe: One Social Importance-Based Collaborative Scheme in MONs

Abstract

The performance of mobile opportunistic networks mainly relies on collaboration among nodes. Thus far, researchers have ignored the influence of node sociality on the incentive process, leading to poor network performance. Considering the fact that followers always imitate the behavior of superstars, this paper proposes FollowMe, which integrates the social importance of nodes with evolutionary game theory to improve the collaborative behavior of nodes. First, we use the prisoner’s dilemma model to establish the matrix of game gains between nodes. Second, we introduce the signal reference as a game rule between nodes. The number of nodes choosing different strategies in a game round is used to calculate the cumulative income of the node in combination with the probability formula. Finally, the Fermi function is used to determine whether the node updates the strategy. The simulation results show that, compared with the random update rule, the proposed strategy is more capable of promoting cooperative behavior between nodes to improve the delivery rate of data packets.

Keywords

• mobile opportunistic networks
• cooperative forwarding
• evolutionary game theory
• social importance