Evolutionary Game Based Strategy Selection for Hybrid V2V Communications

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications is an important technology in vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) to support autonomous data exchange among vehicles. Multiple V2V communications modes have been investigated for VANET, including dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) based on IEEE 802.11p and LTE-V2X, which are suitable for different packet transmission cases. In order to fully exploit the strengths of various modes, hybrid V2V communications strategies are designed in this paper, where each vehicle is allowed to choose different modes for different kinds of transmissions in separate frequency bands for transmission throughput improvement. Furthermore, since it is usually impractical to decide all the vehicles’ communications strategies globally due to high computational complexity and heavy overhead to broadcast the decisions, we model the selection of hybrid V2V communications strategies for vehicles as an evolutionary game. A strategy selection algorithm is then proposed, where each vehicle can select its hybrid V2V communications strategy locally based on its evaluation of the payoffs for different strategies and limited signalling from the base station. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can converge to an asymptotic stable state, which can improve the transmission throughput of vehicles, and is robust to the slight evaluation errors of payoffs and the strategy mutations of a few vehicles.