Optimal Access Control in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach

Heterogeneous vehicular networks (HetVNETs), which applies the heterogenous access technologies (e.g., cellular and WiFi) complementarily to provide seamless and ubiquitous connections to vehicles, have emerged as a promising and more practical paradigm to enable vehicular service applications on the road. However, with different access technologies presenting different costs in terms of download latency and bandwidth cost, how to optimize the connection along the vehicle's trip towards the lowest cost represents fundamental challenges. This paper investigates the issue by proposing an optimal access control scheme for vehicles in HetVNETs. In specific, with different access links, we first model the cost of each vehicle to download its content by jointly considering the conventional vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication and the available access links. A coalition formation game is then introduced to formulate the cooperation among vehicles based on different interests (content cached in vehicles) and requests (content needs to download). After forming the coalition, vehicles in the same coalition can download their requested content by selecting the optimal access link to achieve the minimum cost. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed game approach can lead to the optimal strategy for vehicles and reduce the cost.