Dynamic Popular Content Distribution in Vehicular Networks using Coalition Formation Games

TL;DR

This paper proposes a coalition formation game-based cooperative method for efficient popular content distribution in vehicular networks, significantly outperforming non-cooperative broadcasting approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coalition formation game framework for OBUs to cooperatively exchange content in VANETs, improving distribution efficiency.

Findings

Significant performance improvement over non-cooperative broadcasting.

Effective cooperation increases content distribution success rate.

Simulation results validate the proposed approach's efficiency.

Abstract

Driven by both safety concerns and commercial interests, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have recently received considerable attentions. In this paper, we address popular content distribution (PCD) in VANETs, in which one large popular file is downloaded from a stationary roadside unit (RSU), by a group of on-board units (OBUs) driving through an area of interest (AoI) along a highway. Due to high speeds of vehicles and deep fadings of vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) channels, some of the vehicles may not finish downloading the entire file but only possess several pieces of it. To successfully send a full copy to each OBU, we propose a cooperative approach based on the coalition formation games, in which OBUs exchange their possessed pieces by broadcasting to and receiving from their neighbors. Simulation results show that our proposed approach presents a considerable performance improvement relative to the non-cooperative approach, in which the OBUs broadcast randomly selected pieces to their neighbors as along as the spectrum is detected to be unoccupied.