Understanding the effects of social selfishness on the performance of heterogeneous opportunistic networks

In opportunistic networks the majority of communication mechanisms make use of relay nodes for delivering the messages. Any possible unwillingness of the relay nodes to cooperate, can affect gravely the performance of routing protocols and message dissemination techniques. In this paper we propose a framework for analysing cases where the level of cooperation, or the selfishness of nodes, is related to the social ties of the nodes or their mobility patterns. We model selfishness in heterogeneous opportunistic networks and investigate the effect of it in communication performance. Specifically, we analyse and derive expressions for important metrics, namely the message delivery delay, the average power consumption and the message delivery probability. We demonstrate the applicability of our results in various application scenarios and validate their accuracy with simulations on both synthetic and real-world networks.