A game-theoretic model for users' participation in ephemeral social vehicular networks

Ephemeral social vehicular networks allow for short-lived communications between occupants. While such transient interactions may provide important usage benefits such as traffic warnings, the reality of short-lived interactions also poses challenges for deciding to participate in such social networks. In this paper, we develop a game-theoretic model to understand the role of occupants' incentives to contribute to these ephemeral social networks. We rigorously study the properties of the model and resulting equilibrium outcomes. A further key objective of our work is to evaluate the robustness of our model to different notions of intrinsic motivation for network participation. As a baseline case, we assume that users are homogeneous regarding their motivation. Next, we investigate the impact of different motivational distributions and explore their impact on users' behaviors in a comprehensive simulation setup. We identify the circumstances under which ephemeral social networks are viable and can successfully sustain an increased level of network participation.