Context Aware Clustering in VANETs: a Game Theoretic Perspective

This paper focuses on a particular application of coalitional game theory to Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET), involving only vehicular-to-vehicular communications. Moreover, networking is performed in an ad hoc basis to pursue full context awareness of vehicles. The proposed approach relies upon the setting up of cluster as soon as convoys temporarily arise in traffic dynamics. First, we define a utility function for each node under the hypothesis of being an ordinary node, cluster head or free node. We further prove that a selfish approach is suboptimal when compared to a game of coalition. Then, the communication between clusters (\emph{inter clusters} communications) has been implicitly modelled according to this approach. Finally, from the simulation results, it is shown that a coalitional game outperforms a selfish approach for different nodes spatial deployment and mobility patterns.