Bus-Ads: Bus-based priced advertising in VANETs using coalition formation game

Advertising among vehicles has become popular with the proliferation of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Since the price of the advertisements broadcast in such networks decay over time, distributing advertisements with a high price value to more private vehicles can generate more revenues to the sellers. In this paper, we consider a bus-based priced advertising scenario in a VANET, in which the buses act as the sources of advertisements and broadcast advertisements to private vehicles running within their communication range. Meanwhile, in the area where no bus exists, private vehicles share their advertising segments. The manner in which the buses and the private vehicles distribute and share advertisements in the network so as to draw the largest benefit is addressed in our formulated problem. To solve this problem, a bus-based priced advertisement dissemination scheme dubbed Bus-Ads is proposed by using coalition formation game. First, a bus-broadcast method is presented to enable each bus to distribute the priced advertising segments with the largest potential benefit to surrounding private vehicles. Second, we apply coalition formation game to guide private vehicles to construct broadcast coalitions for efficient advertisement sharing. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed Bus-Ads method can achieve about twice the total benefits compared with that of the non-coalition-based approach.