Cooperation in Opportunistic Networks: An Overlay Approach for Destination-Dependent Utility-Based Schemes

In destination-dependent utility-based schemes, data forwarding is stimulated when a node presents next-hop fitness to destination higher than the current custodian of a message. However, these schemes do not enforce any mechanism to ensure cooperative participation, and altruistic behavior is taken as an assumption, instead. Therefore, a wide range of existing schemes known to provide effective performance may fail in pragmatic settings afflicted with selfish participants. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperation framework which is deployed as an overlay to assist data forwarding utility-based schemes. Effectiveness of our framework is evaluated through intensive simulations with PRoPHET and MARS routing.