Cooperative Offloading in Context-Aware Networks: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Vehicles exchange Floating Car Data (FCD) to improve awareness beyond their local perception and thereby increase traffic safety and comfort. If the FCD is required at distant locations, FCD can be shared using the cellular network to notify vehicles early of upcoming road events. However, this monitoring of the roads congests the cellular network, which is already utilized by other applications. The available bandwidth for monitoring is expected to decrease further with the introduction of fully autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose a hybrid dissemination approach for the distribution of road events in vehicular networks. Our approach aims to utilize only a predefined bandwidth for information exchange, which is achieved by two mechanisms: (i) the offloading of information to Wifi-based Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication and (ii) the filtering of low-impact information. We offload the information to Wifi-based communication using non-cooperative game-theory: Each vehicle chooses the minimum impact of information it wants to receive via the cellular network. Through cooperation, the vehicles in proximity might provide information the other vehicles cannot receive. In the evaluation, we show that our approach significantly improves the data quality at the vehicles compared to traditional offloading approaches while sticking to the predefined bandwidth constraints.