Promotion of cooperation in public goods game by Socialized Speed-Restricted movement

Abstract

This paper studies the formation of cooperation in mobile networks following an Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) approach. Motivated by real-world human motions in mobile social networks, we propose a Socialized Speed-Restricted Mobility (SSRM) model to simulate users' movement. Interactions among mobile users are formulated as public goods game. To validate the SSRM model, we first derive its approximated degree distribution, and prove that exponential and power-law degree networks can be constructed from SSRM. Then we conduct extensive simulations to study the evolution of cooperation. In contrast to the recent work which concluded that random and homogeneous movement is harmful to cooperation, we find cooperation is in fact promoted in mobile networks driven by SSRM. This is mainly due to a reduction of randomness in users' neighborhood, as well as the degree heterogeneity. Results in this paper are helpful in understanding cooperative behaviors in mobile social networks. Our EGT framework can be further used to study the performance of specific cooperation-based protocols.