Evaluating the impact of selfish behaviors on epidemic forwarding in mobile social networks
Yahui Wu, Su Deng, Hongbin Huang · Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment · 2013
Mobile social networks are now very popular, and information can be shared among mobile users through their opportunistic contacts. Information propagation in such networks often needs nodes to work in a cooperative way. However, nodes may not be willing to forward the information to others due to their selfish nature. On the other hand, some nodes may be more willing to forward information to their friends. State-of-the-art works fail to consider the distribution of friends when they evaluate the impact of selfishness on the information propagation. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a theoretical framework to evaluate the impact of selfishness based on the mean-field limit. Simulation shows the accuracy of our model. Numerical results show that the impact of selfishness is related to many factors (e.g., the distribution of friends).