Game Theory Based Cooperation Incentive Mechanism in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Nowadays, Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) emerges as a special and typical form of Internet of Things. VANETs are very useful for decreasing collision accidents and increasing passenger safety. In VANETs the communication between vehicles needs the help of other vehicles with forwarding data packets hop-by-hop. However, a vehicle may be unwilling to help other vehicles to forward packets. For it would cost its computing and communicating resource. And every vehicle is rational. They all want to maximize their utility. Thus, it is necessary to consider seriously how to motivate vehicles to cooperate with each other to relay packets in the communications of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside. In this paper we propose a cooperation incentive mechanism based on game theory. The existence and uniqueness of a Nash Equilibrium is proved. And the results of simulation demonstrate that the mechanism we proposed can greatly stimulate the vehicles to actively participate in the packet forwarding, and it is helpful in improving the performance of the VANETs.