An evolutionary game-based mechanism for unwanted traffic control

With the development of Internet technology and the pervasive use of internet service providers (ISPs), internet users have reached an unprecedented volume. However, the existence of some malicious users seriously undermine the environment of the network by distributing a large amount of unwanted traffic, such as spam, pop-up, and malwares, which can be identified with the cooperation of individual users by installing anti-virus toolkits. In our paper, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic incentive mechanism to promote the cooperation of individual users to curb the expansion of unwanted traffic. Considering the hierarchical nature of real-world management, we model our framework as hierarchical incentive mechanism and combine reward with punishment mechanism to further incentivize cooperative behavior. Meanwhile, the acceptance condition of our framework is analyzed and we carry out a number of simulations to analyze the acceptance conditions of our framework.