Cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks: A Game Theoretic Approach

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of low-size and low-complexity devices that sense the environment and communicate the gathered data through wireless channels. The sensors sense the environment, and send data to control unit for processing and decisions. The data is forwarded via multiple hops or is connected to other networks through a gateway. WSNs have a wide range of applications from monitoring environment and surveillance, to precision agriculture, and from biomedical to structural and infrastructure health monitoring. Technological advances in the past decades have resulted in small, inexpensive and powerful sensors with embedded processing and radio networking capability. Distributed cooperative smart sensor devices networked through the radio link and deployed in large numbers provide enormous opportunities. Cooperation between nodes will increase the performance of wireless sensor network in fulfilling its task. Game theory is used to describe how and why coalitions of sensor nodes form, using the trade-off between the advantage of cooperation (in terms of better performance) and the costs of cooperation (in terms of bandwidth, transmitting information), using the topology of the network. A general game-theoretic framework for WSN is presented, and illustrated by means of an example.