Strategic Network Formation Game for Energy Consumption Balancing

Abstract

Creation of hot-spots is unavoidable, in multihop wireless sensor networks using the least power (or shortest path) routing method. This happens due to the irregularity of underlying network structures. Since hot-spots lose their energy faster than other nodes, they might create network partitions. In this paper, first, we study constructing of energy balanced topologies in a multihop sensor network using only structural information of a network with any-to-any traffic pattern. We consider both forwarding load and transmission power in energy consumption of sensors. Then, we present a strategic network formation game model. We use pairwise stability concept instead of traditional Nash stability and discuss about its advantages over Nash model in our game. After analyzing the game properties, two global and local algorithms for constructing balanced networks are introduced. Our evaluations on sparse and dense uniform networks show that our local algorithm when nodes use their limited neighborhood information, effectively reduces energy consumption imbalance and maximum power consumption while keeping the total power consumption in an acceptable level.