Trust Based Secure Content Delivery in Vehicular Networks: A Bargaining Game Theoretical Approach

Vehicular networks expect to promote the road safety for moving vehicles and improve the driving experience of drivers. In the vehicular networks, secure content delivery becomes significant yet very challenging to protect the vehicles from various threats (i.e., outside attacks and inside attacks). To this end, this paper proposes a security-aware content delivery scheme in vehicular networks when the vehicles request contents from roadside units (RSUs). Specifically, we first establish a novel trust evaluation scheme for both the vehicles and RSUs by exploiting other vehicles to monitor the actions during the process of content delivery. Then, a bargaining game based pricing model is proposed to motivate the vehicles and RSUs to act more positively in the content delivery in vehicular networks. Next, to achieve the secure content delivery and optimize the players' utilities, we apply the backward induction method to analyze the proposed model in a two-round game and an M-round game, respectively. Finally, simulation results are provided to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed scheme by comparing with several conventional schemes.