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. Iraq government’s ban on internet, ban of mobile communications in Hong Kong student protests and ban of internet and messaging during Patel Protests in Gujarat are examples to highlight the same. Alternative applications such as Firechat which use mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to enable off the grid communication between mobile users, have gained immense popularity in these regions. We wish to model the community data sharing mobile ad hoc networks using game theoretic principles and propose a normal form game. In the process, we would try to model selfishness in community data sharing MANETs and define the rationality for selfishness in a MANET. We also look into the impact of altruism in community data sharing MANETs and address the problem of defining the minimum number of altruistic users in a community data sharing MANET, to sustain the MANET. We also look into the existence of alternative behaviors apart from selfishness and altruism, in a community data sharing MANET. We validate the novel model proposed using exhaustive simulations and empirically derive important observations.