Fairness-Aware Game Theoretic Approach for Service Management in Vehicular Clouds

Vehicular cloud computing can perform a broad set of on-demand applications and services, which makes it highly suitable for urban settings. Despite a wide range of benefits to various services and applications by vehicular clouds, there are several issues and challenges that need to be carefully addressed in the context of provisioning services. This paper proposes a cooperative distributed game model to handle service management in vehicular clouds. Under this model, service providers play a cooperative game to maximize their total utility taking into consideration their recourse availability, current load, and total payoff. The proposed game has been implemented and evaluated using simulations with scenarios of light and heavy weight services. The game demonstrates that a cooperative technique leads players to handle higher number of services when compared to a non-cooperative setting. Furthermore, we also show that the proposed game mimics the behaviour of an optimization-based baseline solution. Through various simulation scenarios, we show that the proposed scheme introduces more than 85% similarity to the optimal solution when a few number of players participate, and its similarity to the optimal solution is improved to 99% when the number of the players increases by only 50%.