Co-Safe: Pricing Tradeoff for Safety-Aware Vehicular IoT Applications

In this paper, an end-to-end pricing mechanism, termed as Co-Safe, is proposed to gratify the sensor and vehicle owners (VOs) as well as the Safety Service Providers (SSPs) for the Safety-as-a-Service (Safe-aaS) platform. Safe-aaS platform delivers safety-linked decisions to the customers/users, based on their requirement. Practically, the service regions of the SSPs are confined and may overlap with that of other SSPs. In the existing mechanisms, none of them have taken into account the overlapping service region of the SSPs. In Safe-aaS, the sensor andVOs deploy their sensor nodes over various types of geographical regions and vehicles. Further, the existence of the number of vehicles over any particular geographical region fluctuates with time. Due to the deviation in the position of the vehicles on road, the sensor nodes attached to them also become mobile. However, certainVOs serving the overlapping service regions may act selfishly. TheseVOs provide services to multiple SSPs with the same set of sensor nodes and earn more amount as rent. To provide equal opportunity to theVOs, the interactions among theVOs and SSPs is modeled as a cooperative bargaining game. Further, the utility of theVOs is computed at any time instant and formulated as an optimization function. Thereafter, the maximum utility value is estimated for an optimal value of cost per unit of provisioning the sensor nodes. Depending upon this optimal value, the vehicle owner is selected to provide sensor nodes on rent. After extensive simulation of the proposed pricing mechanism, Co-Safe, it is noted that the utility ofVOs increases and is economical compared to the existing benchmark pricing schemes, Fair Pricing, Dynamic Pricing, and RegPrice.