Performance Analysis of Non-Cooperative Joint Channel and Bandwidth Allocations in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are well known for their fast-changing topology and adverse wireless channel environments. This paper studies the problem of competitive joint channel and bandwidth allocations in multi-radio multi-channel wireless networks for VANETs scenario. Existing works only study competitive multi-radio channel allocation and do not consider two important issues, impact of channel traffic load to transmission quality, and variability of packet arrival rates in links of different node pairs. In addressing these two issues, we extend the problem of competitive multi-radio channel allocation to competitive joint channel and bandwidth allocation. We model the problem as a non-cooperative static game, called joint allocation game. Using the best response concept, we prove existence of pure Nash Equilibriums (NEs) for the joint allocation game. We also investigate efficiency of NEs allocation in the joint allocation game. We design two distributed algorithms to enable node pairs to converge to NEs. These two algorithms are evaluated through extensive simulations. The results show that our algorithms can improve system throughput by 2 or 3 times compared with solutions for competitive multi-radio channel allocation.