A Game Theoretic Coalitional Bidding Scheme for Efficient Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) are different from Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) due to vehicles´ high speeds, rapid change in topology and mobility. Due to these reasons, the routing of end to end messages in VANETs becomes impractical using the existing MANET protocols. In this paper, a cooperative game theoretic bidding scheme is proposed that considers vehicle´s cooperation in the network as its historical message reception rate and allocates the message for the highest bidding vehicle within that vehicle´s transmission range, paying higher reward to the highest bidder. The vehicle with higher reception rate in the network is a suitable choice to be selected as the next forwarding hop. It is proved in this paper that a competitive equilibrium among vehicles that is helpful for guaranteed message transfer always exists for all participating vehicles. The results are collected in terms of message delivery rate, message drop rate, and vehicles cooperation rate by preventing cheating (dropping the message or deferring the message for further transfer) and conformed the best performance when compared with existing protocols in literature in evaluation section.