Information dissemination in vehicular networks via evolutionary game theory

We study the problem of information dissemination in vehicular networks in this paper. Crucial information, such as traffic jamming status, is usually broadcasted inside the network. Each vehicle in the network has its own choice to either forward or drop packets for others. Although the energy consumption in general is not an issue in vehicular networks, forwarding every received packets is still not preferred as it may result in congestion in transmission. We model this problem via evolutionary game theory to investigate the cooperative behavior among vehicles. Simulation results show that, the cooperation ratio in the network is proportional to the setting of synergy factor for the evolutionary game. When nodes change their strategies according to the evolutionary game, information can be disseminated as fast as flooding scheme, while more bandwidth can be reserved.