A Game Theory-based Mechanism to Optimize the Traffic Congestion in VANETs

One of the key issues in Vehicular Ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is to optimize the traffic congestion. Cooperation in these networks is a challenging issue due to their specific characteristics. In this paper, a non-cooperative game theory-based approach is introduced for packet forwarding. Through extensive mathematical analyses and also experimental validation, we prove that the proposed non-cooperative game mechanism attains the Nash equilibrium point. Our designed mechanism encourages all vehicles to collaborate with each other in packet forwarding operations. This, in turn, results in decreasing the payments by nodes to the network side and also results in optimizing traffic congestion. The simulation results established the robustness of the proposed mechanism in terms of cost-related criteria.