A cooperative game based mechanism for autonomous organization and ubiquitous connectivity in VANETs

Abstract Vehicular communications in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) play an interesting role in improving traffic flow on the roads. In such wireless networks, the vehicles cooperate with each other or with the roadside infrastructure to disseminate the data. In this paper, we introduce a mechanism based on coalitional game theory to study the cooperative transmission in VANETs. Each vehicle tries to access the Internet via gateways that can be either fixed or mobile. However, these gateways help the vehicles to access the Internet by cooperatively relaying the vehicles’ messages. Thus, two notions to indicate the availability of transmission between vehicles and gateways are introduced. These notions are chosen to deal with the highly dynamic topology in VANETs, namely the notion of an encounter and the notion of a link’s predicted lifetime. The problem is modelled as a non-transferable utility game. Then, an algorithm is proposed to dynamically form coalitions among the vehicles. Moreover, a probability of being active is set in terms of speed of the received vehicle. To evaluate the proposed solution, two scenarios are used: fixed gateways scenario and mobile gateways scenario. The numerical results show that the scenario of mobile gateways is more effective in terms of stimulating vehicles to regroup into coalitions. Hence, this helps the vehicles to access the Internet.