An Incentive-Compatible Routing Protocol for Delay-Tolerant Networks Using Second-Price Sealed-Bid Auction Mechanism

Delay Tolerant Networks are a type of challenging, uninterrupted network in which there is not an end-to-end path between the source and the destination. These networks play a key role in managing crises in natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods, and more. Due to limited resources, nodes may be reluctant to cooperate in the message relaying and may behave selfishly. Eventually, this lack of cooperation can result in performance degradation. Game theory is one of the mathematical tools to motivate the intermediate nodes to forward messages. In this paper, we use the theory of auction between relay nodes to motivate them to collaborate in forwarding messages. Based on the second-price sealed-bid auction mechanism, the node that does not cooperate in forwarding messages fails to acquire utility. In this way, if the node itself intends to send a message to another node, it will not be able to do so due to a lack of budget. Thus, the selfish behavior of the node causes it to be harmed. Our simulations using the ONE simulator shows that the performance of the proposed method in moderate traffic is improved in terms of significant criteria such as delivery ratio, average buffer usage, hop count, overhead, and so on. The results also show that under intense traffic conditions, the performance of the proposed method is far better than that of moderate traffic.