Decentralized Incentive Mechanism for Cooperative Content Dissemination in Vehicular Networks
Jinna Hu, Chen Chen, Lin Cai, Lei Liu · 2020
Cooperative content dissemination allows vehicles to directly retrieve content from each other by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. It can release the downlink traffic pressure caused by repetitive of popular content downloads. A critical but open issue is how to motivate vehicles to participate in content dissemination. Most of the existing incentive mechanisms are proposed under a centralized architecture that suffers from the single point attack and trustless third-platform. In this paper, we propose a decentralized incentive mechanism for cooperative content dissemination in vehicular networks. By introducing the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based blockchain technology, a decentralized architecture is proposed, which can improve incentive efficiency and reliability by removing the third-platform. Next, using the contract theory, the vehicles are divided into different types according to their route feature, and a series of contracts are designed for different types of vehicles to provide suitable incentives, as well as maximize the content generators' profit. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution.