Vertical group handover congestion game for a vehicular platoon in VLC networks

Vehicle platooning systems improve road active safety while reducing vehicular congestion. Visible light communications (VLC) is an efficient technology that enables safety messages exchange between platoon members, and thus improves road safety. Nevertheless, packet transmission could be perturbed by neighboring vehicles, impacting the quality of service and inducing packet loss. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to tackle the provisioning of a vertical handover, of a group of competing platoon vehicles, to a radio frequency (RF) technology. This paper models the network selection procedure by means of a congestion game with an unknown number of players. More precisely, the game considers players that aim at choosing resources among a certain number of resources. Moreover, the game considers the lack of information about the users’ preferences. The main objective is to distribute platoon vehicles among available RF technologies, while maximizing the throughput of each user and avoiding network congestion. The game is solved with the safety-level equilibrium. Performance analysis shows that our solution offers high throughput, low delay, and packet loss ratio for each platoon vehicle while achieving load balancing among available networks.