Priority-based rate adaptation using game theory in vehicular networks

Rate adaptation is extremely crucial to the system performance of wireless networks. Existing rate adaptation schemes mainly make use of channel information (e.g., packet error rate or signal strengths of received packets) to adapt transmission rates. In this paper, we find out that it is beneficial for rate adaptation schemes to consider priorities of packets when adapting transmission rates. We then propose a priority-based rate adaptation scheme for vehicular networks which jointly considers channel conditions and priorities of packets using game theory. In our scheme, we consider rate adaptation as a game which consists of different priorities of users and adopt a Stackelberg game model to regulate behaviors of self-interested users. Extensive ns-2 simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can provide much better performance for high priority users than existing schemes, while maintaining good performance for low priority users.