Non-cooperative game of effective channel capacity and security strength in vehicular networks

Abstract Vehicular ad-hoc networks pose stringent requirements on quality-of-service (QoS) and security strength in parallel because of their open channels and highly dynamic topology. Harmonizing these two conflicting goals is an urgent challenge, especially in VNs that are characterized by restrictive resources, e.g. bandwidth and link lifetime. This paper aims to balance the anticipated QoS and security strength in context to fully utilize limited network and computing resources to attain a satisfactory performance rating without compromising any security. To this end, we use non-cooperative game theory to formulate node utility, synthesizing the channel capacity and security strength from the perspective of adaptively controlling the transmit power and encryption block length in Nakagami multipath fading (NMF) channels. Moreover, we analyze the non-cooperative behavior of a “communication player” in controlling the transmit power and a “security player” in deciding the encryption block length, both of whom together strive to maximize the utility function at minimum cost. We then theoretically derive the pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Extensive numerical calculations are conducted to comprehensively investigate the reaction of the Nash equilibrium against the various combinations of the considered parameters. The results show that the proposed joint optimization method is capable of self-adapting to the vehicular context and improving the communication quality without compromising on security.