Incentive based scheme for improving data availability in vehicular ad-hoc networks.

Vehicular networks are popular in recent years to provide low cost communication medium during mobility. Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are one of the major categories of emerging technology. DTNs work on carry and forward mechanism to deliver data to the destination. The network performance gets severely affected due to reluctance shown by selfish nodes where few nodes show no interest in forwarding others data due to lack of any personal profit. The proposed mechanism is based on coalition game theory and discusses about incentive based mechanism which provides incentive to nodes which are forwarding data to forward to destination and motivates other vehicles in the network to participate in coalition to forward data. This scheme not only encourages other selfish nodes to forward their private data and other nodes' public data as early as possible to destination but also increases reliability in the network as more nodes show their interest in selected routing protocol. The proposed scheme outperforms in overall benefit earned by individual node and whole coalition, and increases mutual cooperation which improves availability of data in the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]