A Game Theory Approach for Platoon-Based Driving for Multimedia Transmission in VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) allow users, services, and vehicles to share information and will change our life experience with new autonomous driving applications. Multimedia will be one of the core services in VANETs and are becoming a reality in smart environments, ranging from safety and security traffic warnings to live entertainment and advertisement videos. However, VANETs have a dynamic network topology with short contact time, which leads to communication flaws and delays, increasing packet loss, and decreasing the Quality of Experience (QoE) of transmitted videos. To cope with this, neighbor vehicles moving on the same direction and wishing to cooperate should form a platoon, where platoon members act as a relay node to forward video packets in autonomous VANETs. In this article, we introduce a game theory approach for platoon-based driving (GT4P) for video dissemination services in urban and highway VANET scenarios. GT4P encourages the cooperation between neighbor vehicles by offering reward (e.g., money or coupon) for vehicles participating in the platoon. In this sense, GT4P establishes a platoon by taking into account vehicle direction, speed, distance, link quality, and travel path, which reduces the impact of vehicle mobility on the video transmission. Simulation results confirm the efficiency of GT4P for ensuring video transmissions with high QoE support compared to existing platoon-based driving protocols.