Price Competition between Road Side Units Operators in Vehicular Networks

Vladimir Fux (1, 2) , Patrick Maillé (1, 2) , Matteo Cesana (3)

1 RSM - Département Réseaux, Sécurité et Multimédia
2 OCIF - Objets communicants pour l'Internet du futur
3 Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione

Vehicular networks, besides supporting safety- oriented applications, are nowadays expected to provide effec- tive communication infrastructure also for supporting leisure- oriented application including content sharing, gaming and In- ternet access on the move. This work focuses on Vehicle to Infras- tructure (V2I) scenarios, where multiple content providers own a physical infrastructure of Road Side Units (RSUs) which they use to sell contents to moving vehicles. Content provider/RSU owners compete by adapting their pricing strategies with the selfish objective to maximize their own revenues. We study the economics of the price competition between the providers by resorting to game theoretic tools. Namely, we formalize a simultaneous price game among the operators further studying the existence of Nash equilibria and their related quality in terms of Price of Anarchy and Price of Stability. The proposed game model is finally used to assess the impact onto the game equilibra of several practical factors including the vehicles' willingness to pay, the traffic densities, and the configuration of the physical networks of RSUs.

Mots clés: Vehicular networks; Price competition; Game Theory

Domaines: Informatique et théorie des jeux [cs.GT]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Vladimir Fux, Patrick Maillé, Matteo Cesana. Price Competition between Road Side Units Operators in Vehicular Networks. Networking 2014 : IFIP Networking conference, Jun 2014, Trondheim, Norway. ⟨10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2014.6857112⟩. ⟨hal-01057072⟩