Power Efficient Handoff Management in Hybrid V2X Communication: Game-Theoretic Approach to Resource Allocation With Load Reduction

In this study, we jointly investigate the connectivity probability and the number of required resource blocks (RBs) for load reduction during handoff (HO) decision for hybrid vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. Frequent HOs is a major issue in vehicular communication, causing various concerns such as loading problems in the overlapping area, signalling overhead, and decreasing the bandwidth efficiency of the network. To combat the loading problem due to HO in the overlapping area and the low convergence issues, we propose a game-theoretic approach to resolve the imbalance of resource allocation amongst the clusters at the edge of the coverage area. The proposed game-based Flexible Resource Allocation (FRA) approach optimally redistributes the resources to all clusters within a g-NodeB (g-NB). We obtain a closed-form expression of the transmit power for a cellular-vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) standard of 5G network, besides analyzing the effects of connectivity probability and required resources for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) during HO. We explore the implications of non-uniform speeds among the clusters and perform an analysis of time complexity. Additionally, we compare two types of cost functions. A linear cost function links a player’s cost to their action proportionally, while a nonlinear cost function shows a non-proportional relationship between a player’s cost and their action. The simulation results indicate that, with an increasing number of clusters, the linear cost case outperforms the non-linear case in both connectivity probability (which increases by 30.18%) and the number of required resources (which is reduced by 39%) in the HO region. The analytical derivation has been verified through simulation results.