Game theory based relay vehicle selection for VANET

As a special form of mobile ad hoc network (MANET), vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is expected to support communication between vehicles, and between vehicles and stationary infrastructures, such as access points (APs). However, due to the highly mobile characteristics of VANET, the direct connection between source vehicles (SVs) and APs might be inaccessible. In this case, relay vehicles (RVs) can be applied for supporting multi-hop connection between SVs and APs. In the practical application scenario that multiple candidate RVs are available, the problem of selecting the optimal RV has to be considered. This paper proposes a Game theory-based RV selection algorithm, which jointly considers multiple metrics from various protocol layers, including the characteristics of physical channel, the link status, the bandwidth and delay characteristics of RVs and user service requirement. The payoff functions of both SVs and RVs are modeled. In order to optimize the overall system performance, a joint SV and RV cooperative Game model is established. The optimization problem is formulated and solved based on bipartite matching algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that compared to previous algorithm, the proposed algorithm offers better performance in terms of throughput, transmission delay and successful transmission rate.