Dynamic routing for social information sharing

TL;DR

This paper addresses incentivizing diverse route choices in mobile social networks to maximize shared location-based information, proposing mechanisms to improve social welfare and analyzing the tradeoffs involved.

Contribution

It introduces incentive mechanisms based on side payments and content restrictions to promote path diversity among selfish users in dynamic routing.

Findings

Proposed two incentive mechanisms for path diversity.

Analyzed price of anarchy showing tradeoffs in participation.

Extended classical dynamic routing with externalities.

Abstract

Today mobile users are intensively interconnected thanks to the emerging mobile social networks, where they share location-based information with each other when traveling on different routes and visit different areas of the city. In our model the information collected is aggregated over all users' trips and made publicly available as a public good. Due to information overlap, the total useful content amount increases with the diversity in path choices made by the users, and it is crucial to motivate selfish users to choose different paths despite the potentially higher costs associated with their trips. In this paper we combine the benefits from social information sharing with the fundamental routing problem where a unit mass of non-atomic selfish users decide their trips in a non-cooperative game by choosing between a high-cost and a low-cost path. To remedy the inefficient low-content equilibrium where all users choose to explore a single path (the low-cost path), we propose and analyse two new incentive mechanisms that can be used by the social network application, one based on side payments and the other on restricting access to content for users that choose the low cost path. We also obtain interesting price of anarchy results that show some fundamental tradeoffs between achieving path diversity and maintaining greater user participation, motivating a combined mechanism to further increase the social welfare. Our model extends classical dynamic routing in the case of externalities caused from traffic on different paths of the network.