Economy driven content dissemination in Delay Tolerant Networks

Majority of the existing Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing protocols attempt to minimize the message delay, forwarding count, or required storage. However, for many DTN applications such as distributing commercial content, targeting the best performance for only one index and neglecting the others is insufficient. A more practical solution would be to strike a balance between multiple of those performance indices. This paper introduces a Gain-aware Dissemination Protocol (GDP) which attempts to reach the maximum economic gain of content delivery by maintaining a balance between the value achieved via message delivery and the involved forwarding costs given out as user rebates. Economic gain from disseminating content is defined as the generated value upon content delivery minus its forwarding costs. The key concept behind the proposed protocol is to adaptively balance between dissemination latency and forwarding costs in order to maximize the economic gain. Using the DTN simulation software ONE, we characterize the GDP protocol with varying mobility models, content sources, and content generation times.