Economic incentive-based brokerage schemes for improving data availability in mobile-P2P networks

In mobile ad hoc peer-to-peer (M-P2P) networks, data availability is typically low due to rampant free-riding, frequent network partitioning and mobile resource constraints. This work proposes the E-Broker system for improving data availability in M-P2P networks. The main contributions of E-Broker are threefold. First, it proposes the EIB (Economic Incentive-based Brokerage) scheme, which incentivizes relay peers to act as information brokers for performing value-added routing and replication in M-P2P networks, thereby effectively improving data availability. Second, it proposes the EIB+ (enhanced Economic Incentive-based Brokerage) scheme, which extends the EIB scheme by incorporating three different broker scoring strategies for providing additional incentives to brokers towards providing better service. Moreover, EIB+ facilitates load-sharing among the peers. Third, it experimentally determines the number of brokers, beyond which the mobile peers are better off without a broker-based architecture i.e., they can directly access data from the data-providing peers. Our performance evaluation indicates that the proposed schemes are indeed effective in improving query response times, data availability and query hop-counts at reasonable communication traffic cost in M-P2P networks as compared to a recent existing scheme. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.