Weighted Voting Game Based Relay Node Managemnet in VANETs

In traditional Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) deployments, permanent and robust connection establishment to road side units (RSU) has arisen as a crucial problem. Here it is a known fact that, this challenge has been triggered by high mobility pattern of vehicles. To handle this problem, optimal relay vehicle selection can be seen as an efficient solution. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel optimal and fair relay vehicle selection algorithm based on weighted voting game. In our game theoretic approach, relay vehicle selections have been performed by various cooperative coalitions. Note that game theory is a perfect tool while designing such an algorithm as it is a formal applied mathematical tool to analyze and model complicated situations of interactive decision making. Our proposed weighted voting game algorithm can achieve fair and optimal results as well as increasing throughput and decreasing message transmission delay during packet dissemination as a result of using Banzhaf power measure. Performance evaluation results depicted that compared to non-cooperative methods, throughput increases by 24.4% and message dissemination delay decreases by 18%.