A game theoretic approach to community based data sharing in mobile ad hoc networks

Abstract

Government interventions on usage of free speech for communication has been rising of late. The government of Iraq’s ban on the Internet, ban of mobile communications in Hong Kong student protests highlight the same. Applications like Firechat which use mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to enable off the grid communication between mobile users, have gained popularity in these regions. However, there have been limited studies on selfish user behavior in community data sharing networks. We wish to study these data sharing communities using game theoretic principles and propose a normal form game. We model selfishness in community data sharing MANETs and define the rationality for selfishness in these networks. We also look at the impact of altruism in community data sharing MANETs and address the issue of minimum number of altruistic users needed to sustain the MANET. We validate the novel model using exhaustive simulations and empirically derive important observations.