GTR: A novel routing scheme based on game theory in opportunistic networks

Existing routing schemes in opportunistic networks can be classified two categories: multi-copy based schemes and single-copy based schemes. Multi-copy based schemes can increase the robustness of networks and reduce average delay. However, they consume a large amount of network resources and induce large overhead. Single-copy based schemes can save network resources, but it is difficult to guarantee the transmission delay and packet delivery ratio for these schemes. Hence, how to design an efficient routing scheme which can make a tradeoff between multi-copy schemes and single-copy schemes in opportunistic networks with limited resources is a challenging issue. Inspired by this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel routing scheme based on game theory in opportunistic networks under limited resources, named GTR. In GTR, we map the message transmission to a multi-player bargaining model. By constructing proper utility function, GTR can save the network resources, and achieve better performance in dense opportunistic networks. Our extensive simulation results also demonstrate this point, and GTR performs better compared to some classical routing schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio, average delay, overhead ratio and average hops.