An optimized content delivery approach based on demand–supply theory in disruption-tolerant networks

Disruption-tolerance networks (DTNs) are suitable for applications that may lack continuous network connectivity. Examples of such applications include coupon distribution, crisis relief, traffic notification, and broadcasting news from a website. Generally, these contents have a temporal constraint, so that their value will be decreased over time. DTNs have to utilize mobile relay nodes to transmit messages from the sender to the destination. These relay nodes often have selfish behavior, leading to a lack of cooperation. To improve the overall routing functionality, one must motivate relay nodes to share their resources. Thus, different incentives and rewarding mechanisms must be devised to encourage cooperation. We believe that microeconomics theories are appropriate mathematical tools to model the interactions between the DTN nodes. In microeconomics, buyers aim at maximizing their utility concerning their budget constraints. In this paper, the demand–supply theory is deployed to mitigate nodes’ selfishness and to create incentives among them. Each user can receive multiple sub-messages each of which containing special benefits for his/her. In this way, nodes are motivated to forward messages, which in turn leads to greater profitability for them and maximizing the social welfare of the society. The simulation of the proposed algorithm illustrates its superiority in terms of significant criteria such as delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, number of dropped messages, buffering time, number of hops, overhead ratio, etc.