Wireless sensor network analysis through a coalitional game: Application to a distributed Kalman filter

The number of applications in which wireless communication networks are used has grown enormously during the last two decades. Issues such as the communicational burden of the different distributed architectures play a very important role because of their impact on the energy consumption of the devices that compose the network. In this paper we propose to study the underlying properties of a wireless sensor network in which a set of agents switch between different communication strategies in order to estimate their states while minimizing communicational costs. The problems of how to decide the communication strategy, share the benefits/costs and detect which are the most critical links in the network are solved using tools from game theory. The proposed scheme is demonstrated through a simulation example.