Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a promising secure and privacy-preserving incentive mechanism in the vehicular cloud (VC). Such an incentive will convince vehicles with excess sensing data to join in the VC without the risk of privacy disclosure. The proposed scheme uses the Bargain Game theory to model the interactions between a VC server (VCS) and vehicles. With the proposed incentive mechanism, the VCS can select competent vehicles with which to collaborate for the announced task, while the vehicles can earn payment for participation. Further, our mechanism ensures fairness between all participants in terms of reward. We also exploit the signcryption technique to achieve mutual authentication between the VCS and vehicles as well as to prevent the private information of these vehicles from being disclosed. Simulation results are provided to show that the proposed privacy-preserving incentive mechanism is beneficial to both the VCS and vehicles, resulting in a win-win situation.