Trust-Aware V2V Relay-Assisted Content Distribution in Cellular V2X Networks

The vehicular networks are envisioned to support the future intelligent transportation system (ITS). Content dissemination is vital to achieving efficient data traffic management and real-time decision making. Limited resources constrain the vehicles and edge network, but the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technology can support the conventional cellular communication link in content dissemination. To explore the full benefit of V2V, relay vehicles can be selected to support direct V2V links in situations where direct communication is not feasible due to distance or shadowing. However, not all vehicles will agree to participate in relaying without any reward. To counter this problem, we introduce an incentive mechanism to entice vehicles to assist in relaying. The trustworthiness between users is considered when establishing a V2V communication link. We jointly consider the content distribution mode and relay selection problems to maximize system utility. Moreover, improved auction algorithms were proposed to improve user utility. The proposed scheme is compared against some closely related baseline schemes.