Contract Based Data Sensing and Dissemination for Vehicular Edge Networks

The rapid advancement in communication and computation technologies of vehicles has led to an explosion of data at the network edge; the data can be used in decision-making and supporting services such as traffic management, environmental monitoring, and autonomous driving. The vehicles can assist in data sensing and dissemination. However, not all vehicles will agree to participate in such a task without a reward. Designing incentive mechanisms for vehicular crowdsensing is complicated due to the high mobility of vehicles, link reliability, and utility maximization. This paper proposes a vehicular data sensing and dissemination scheme based on contract theory; vehicles are offered sensing contracts while considering their performance value, which includes reputation, link reliability, and sensing power. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better than some closely related baseline schemes.