Adaptive alert content dissemination protocol inspired from volunteer's dilemma game for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) can serve to guarantee road safety and comfort for drivers. This is done using broadcasting which is the most used technique to disseminate data. If done blindly, it leads to the famous broadcast storm problem. The broadcast storm problem occurs when a huge amount of messages is sent, which increases resource consumption. Therefore, to solve this problem, it is important to find the compromise between minimizing the number of rebroadcast messages while maintaining good latency, throughput, and reachability. In this work, we opt for a non-cooperative forwarding, which is a valuable technique enabling vehicle nodes to cover the network with a minimum amount of rebroadcasts. We modeled this behavior using game theory through a volunteer dilemma approach. This paper presents a novel broadcasting protocol called the Nash Equilibrium Scheme (NES), which investigates how a volunteer dilemma approach can be implemented in the context of VANETs. This is aiming to mitigate the storm problem. Using this approach, we successfully solved the content and alert incident messages dissemination problem. Simulations were performed using NS2 while considering two scenarios (a highway and a grid). The performance simulation shows that our implementation outperforms prior work in terms of several metrics.