  Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have recently attracted a lot of attention
due to their immense potentials and applications. Wide range of coverage and
accessibility to end users make VANETs a good target for commercial companies.
In this paper, we consider a scenario in which advertising companies aim to
disseminate their advertisements in different areas of a city by utilizing
VANETs infrastructure. These companies compete for renting the VANETs
infrastructure to spread their advertisements. We partition the city map into
different blocks, and consider a manager for all the blocks who is in charge of
splitting the time between interested advertising companies. Each advertising
company (AdC) is charged proportional to the allocated time. In order to find
the best time splitting between AdCs, we propose a Stackelberg game scheme in
which the block manager assigns the companies to the blocks and imposes the
renting prices to different companies in order to maximize its own profit.
Based on this, AdCs request the amount of time they desire to rent the
infrastructure in order to maximize their utilities. To obtain the Stackelberg
equilibrium of the game, a mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem is
solved using the proposed optimal and sub-optimal algorithms. The simulation
results demonstrate that the sub-optimal algorithm approaches the optimal one
in performance with lower complexity.
