  Vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications enable vehicular networks to support
a wide range of applications for enhancing the efficiency of road
transportation. While existing work focused on non-cooperative techniques for
V2R communications between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs), this paper
investigates novel cooperative strategies among the RSUs in a vehicular
network. We propose a scheme whereby, through cooperation, the RSUs in a
vehicular network can coordinate the classes of data being transmitted through
V2R communications links to the vehicles. This scheme improves the diversity of
the information circulating in the network while exploiting the underlying
content-sharing vehicle-to-vehicle communication network. We model the problem
as a coalition formation game with transferable utility and we propose an
algorithm for forming coalitions among the RSUs. For coalition formation, each
RSU can take an individual decision to join or leave a coalition, depending on
its utility which accounts for the generated revenues and the costs for
coalition coordination. We show that the RSUs can self-organize into a
Nash-stable partition and adapt this partition to environmental changes.
Simulation results show that, depending on different scenarios, coalition
formation presents a performance improvement, in terms of the average payoff
per RSU, ranging between 20.5% and 33.2%, relative to the non-cooperative case.
