Cooperative transmission in vehicular networks is studied by using
coalitional game and pricing in this paper. There are several vehicles and
roadside units (RSUs) in the networks. Each vehicle has a desire to transmit
with a certain probability, which represents its data burtiness. The RSUs can
enhance the vehicles' transmissions by cooperatively relaying the vehicles'
data. We consider two kinds of cooperations: cooperation among the vehicles and
cooperation between the vehicle and RSU. First, vehicles cooperate to avoid
interfering transmissions by scheduling the transmissions of the vehicles in
each coalition. Second, a RSU can join some coalition to cooperate the
transmissions of the vehicles in that coalition. Moreover, due to the mobility
of the vehicles, we introduce the notion of encounter between the vehicle and
RSU to indicate the availability of the relay in space. To stimulate the RSU's
cooperative relaying for the vehicles, the pricing mechanism is applied. A
non-transferable utility (NTU) game is developed to analyze the behaviors of
the vehicles and RSUs. The stability of the formulated game is studied.
Finally, we present and discuss the numerical results for the 2-vehicle and
2-RSU scenario, and the numerical results verify the theoretical analysis.Comment: accepted by IEEE ICC'1