A Game Theoretic Approach for Distributed and Coordinated Channel Access Control in Cooperative Vehicle Safety Systems

Fairness and efficiency are two key requirements that have to be guaranteed in channel resource allocation in cooperative vehicle safety systems. Existing channel access control strategies, however, rely on each individual node to adjust networking parameters independently according to its locally measured state information, thus leading to unfairness. Although some coordinated strategies have been proposed to resolve this issue, they pay little attention to the efficiency. In order to achieve the tradeoff between fairness and efficiency, in this paper, we propose a utility function in terms of inter-packet reception time required to capture the performance of consecutive successful packets' reception under various vehicle densities. A channel access control problem among vehicles is then formulated as a non-cooperation game model. This model utilizes a punishment function to penalize a node that monopolizes the channel resources and hence can enable nodes to coordinate with each other to achieve desired fairness and efficiency. Next, a distributed decision-making scheme for channel access control is designed. It adjusts transmission rate in a coordinated manner and can guide each node to reach a Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium point. The experimental results validate that the proposed strategy can result in fair channel resource allocation and ensure high-tracking accuracy for each vehicle under dynamic traffic conditions.