Game Theoretical Analysis on Cooperation Stability and Incentive Effectiveness in Community Networks

Community networks, the distinguishing feature of which is membership admittance, appear on P2P networks, social networks, and conventional Web networks. Joining the network costs money, time or network bandwidth, but the individuals get access to special resources owned by the community in return. The prosperity and stability of the community are determined by both the policy of admittance and the attraction of the privileges gained by joining. However, some misbehaving users can get the dedicated resources with some illicit and low-cost approaches, which introduce instability into the community, a phenomenon that will destroy the membership policy. In this paper, we analyze on the stability using game theory on such a phenomenon. We propose a game-theoretical model of stability analysis in community networks and provide conditions for a stable community. We then extend the model to analyze the effectiveness of different incentive policies, which could be used when the community cannot maintain its members in certain situations. Then we verify those models through a simulation. Finally, we discuss several ways to promote community network’s stability by adjusting the network’s properties and give some proposal on the designs of these types of networks from the points of game theory and stability.