Stimulating traffic information transfer in non-cooperative vehicular ad hoc networks

Recently, with the fast development of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), many more applications on VANET have emerged, such as vehicle navigation systems (VNSs). To make VNSs more effective, a good way is to integrate VNSs with traffic information, which is disseminated over VANET. However, when vehicle users are selfish, they may not participate in the process of traffic information transfer if there is no incentive scheme provided. In this paper, we design a novel incentive scheme to stimulate the vehicles to participate in traffic information transfer. Our analysis shows that under our scheme, the system will converge to a unique subgame perfect equilibrium, an agreement between two vehicle users will be always reached in the first round of the game, and the system will achieve good fairness. Numerical results verify that our incentive scheme can stimulate the vehicles to become willing to participate in traffic information transfer, and the fairness is guaranteed.