Towards Opportunistic Resource Sharing in Mobile Social Networks: an Evolutionary Game Theoretic Approach

Abstract

In mobile social networks, the success of resource sharing depends on a high level of cooperations. The motivation of this work is to seek conditions under which cooperation prevails without additional incentive mechanisms such as credit and reputation-based schemes. We apply the Evolutionary Game Theory framework to investigate the formation of cooperation in opportunistic resource sharing. First, we extend the existing Small World In Motion mobility model to preserve real-world localized mobility patterns. On top of the mobility model, a game theoretic model tailored for resource sharing is developed. Preliminary simulation results show that high user cooperation rate emerges when the cost of resource sharing is sufficiently small, even if the Nash Equilibrium of the resource sharing game is non-cooperation. Moreover, we discovered that heterogeneous user mobility patterns promote cooperation.