Popular Content Distribution Scheme with Cooperative Transmission Based on Coalitional Game in VANETs

The recent rapid development of Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have motivated an increasing study in data distribution. As one of key services in VANETs, the Popular Content Distribution (PCD) has become a heated issue. In PCD, a popular content is broadcast from the roadside units (RSUs) to the onboard units (OBUs) who pass the Area of Interest (AoI). Due to the high speed and the limited wireless bandwidth, OBUs can only download a part of popular content in the pure-infrastructure networks. Addressing the problem, we propose a cooperative PCD scheme which allows the OBUs communicate with other OBUs to complete the missing chunk of content. And the coalition game is introduced into our scheme to model and analyze the cooperation behavior between OBUs. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with other content distribution schemes, our proposed scheme has better performance in term of average content percentage of OBUs, the number of completed OBUs and the 99% finished iterations.