Cooperation and coalitional stability in decentralized wireless networks

Abstract

In this paper we consider a wireless contextualization of the local routing protocol on scale-free networks embedded in a plane and analyze on the one hand how cooperation affects network efficiency, and on the other hand the stability of cooperation structures. Cooperation is interpreted on k-cliques as local exchange of topological information between cooperating agents. Cooperative activity of nodes in the proposed model changes the routing strategy at the level of the coalition group and consequently influences the entire routing process on the network. We show that the proposed cooperation model enhances the network performance in the sense of reduced passage time and jamming. Payoff of a certain node is defined based on its energy consumption during the routing process. We show that if the payoff of the nodes is the energy saving compared to the all-singleton case, basically coalitions are not stable, since increased activity within coalition increases costs. We introduce coalitional load balancing and net reward to enhance coalitional stability and thus the more efficient operation of the network. As in the proposed model cooperation strongly affects routing dynamics of the network, externalities will arise and the game is defined in a partition function form.