Advanced detection of selfish vehicles for local file sharing in sparse vehicular networks

Recent advances in wireless technology provide interesting and effective solutions for vehicular applications. Due to the high deployment cost, implementing roadside units (RSUs) with low cost while maintaining high data throughput has become an important topic. This letter develops a selfishness detection mechanism for file sharing that addresses fairly use vehicle-to-vehicle communications. In locations where an RSU is not immediately available or cannot be directly used, the selfish behavior of not sharing with neighbors or not downloading from an RSU is difficult to detect. This letter proposes a novel selfishness detection mechanism, SDM, to force vehicles to stabilize at a socially optimal operating point incurring maximum total utility. The SDM along with our proposed hybrid self-history mechanism outperforms previous shared history mechanisms, even though the majority of users are selfish.