Volunteers Dilemma Game Inspired Broadcast Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Multi-hop broadcast communication is one of the main schemes for supporting message dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient receiver-oriented broadcast scheme in which the receiving vehicles’ probability of forwarding is modeled by the symmetric volunteer’s dilemma game. Based on this game, the vehicles that receive the broadcast message are players. At least one of the players should pay a cost and be a volunteer to rebroadcast the message, and then all will benefit from this volunteering. Utilizing fuzzy logic techniques and considering information from the network layer about local density and probability of transmission, the contention window size at the MAC layer will be adjusted. We develop ns-3 simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed volunteer’s dilemma inspired broadcast (VDIB) scheme in terms of reachability, number of rebroadcasts per covered vehicle, number of bytes sent per covered vehicle, and per-hop delay. VDIB performance is compared with that of the distance-to-mean broadcast method, broadcast component of contention-based forwarding, distribution-adaptive distance with channel quality, statistical location assisted broadcast, fuzzy logic-based broadcast, bandwidth efficient fuzzy logic assisted broadcast, and intelligent hybrid adaptive broadcast protocols in both highway and urban environments.