Non-cooperative game based congestion control for data rate optimization in vehicular ad hoc networks

The growth of connected vehicles in smart cities increases the number of information being communicated on the Internet of Vehicle networks. This causes wireless channel congestion problems, which degrades the network performance and reliability due to the low throughput, high average delay and the high packets loss. Therefore, this paper proposes a non-cooperative game approach to control congestion in the vehicular ad-hoc network channel where the nodes behave as selfish players requesting high data transmission rates. Moreover, the satisfaction of the Nash equilibrium condition for the optimum data transmission rate for each vehicle, is proven. A utility function is introduced based on data transmission rates, the priority of vehicles and contention delay in order to obtain the optimal rates. The performance of the proposed approach has been evaluated and validated in comparison with three others approaches over two testing scenarios for highway and urban traffic. The results show that the network performance and efficiency have been improved by an overall average of 35%, 30% and 37.17% in terms of packets loss, channel busy time and number of collision messages, respectively, as compared with the state-of-the-art-strategies for the highway testing scenario. Similar performance is achieved for the urban testing scenario. Keywords: Vehicular ad hoc networks, Congestion control, Non-cooperative game approach, Data rate adaptation, IoV applications.