An Empirical Study of Human Altruistic Behaviors in Opportunistic Networks

Abstract

The success of data forwarding applications in opportunistic networks (OppNets) primarily depends on the altruistic behavior of users who form the network. Therefore, a good study of user altruism is crucial in designing and building effective OppNets. Here battery is the resource constraint and relaying data for others is the altruistic decision. We conducted two types of experiments, one with an Android application and the other based on AMT platform. With around 800 subjects, we found that users are approximately 0.50 - 0.70 altruistic on average and they are less likely to perform altruistic behavior when the cost is higher than 10% of the remaining battery level. Social ties have impact on users' altruism. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work to study human altruism using mobile computing application, which not only bring us fundamental understanding on human behaviours but also help to gain insights for boosting efficiency of relevant computing frameworks.