A Game Theory Approach for Congestion Control in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The continuous transfer of messages in vehicular ad hoc networks leads to a heavy network traffic load. This causes congestion in the wireless channel which degrades the reliability of the network and significantly affects the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as packet loss, throughput and average delay. Therefore, it is vital to adapt the transmitting data rates in a way that ensure that acceptable performance is achieved and that there is reliable communication of information between vehicles in smart cities. This means the information will be delivered in a timely manner to the drivers, which in turn allows implementation of efficient solutions for improved mobility and comfort in intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, congestion control in the communication channel has been formulated as a non-cooperative game approach and the vehicles act as players in the game to request a high data rate in a selfish way. The solution of the optimal game is presented by using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions and Lagrange multipliers. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves network efficiency in the presence of congestion by an overall average of 50.40%, 49.37%, 58.39% and 36.66% in terms of throughput, average delay, number of lost packets and total channel busy time as compared to Carrier-Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance mechanism.