An energy-efficient coalition game model for wireless sensor networks

Energy consumption is an important performance measure in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Data transmission strategies of the WSN nodes have a great impact on the energy consumption. When the nodes work separately, the chosen strategy is local optimum and cannot prolong the whole network's lifetime due to the selfishness of each node. To reduce the whole WSN's energy consumption and prolong its lifetime, some nodes will cooperate and form a coalition. Based on the game theory, in this paper we adopt Shapley value as the coalition's payoff sharing mechanism. Consequently, we propose an energy-efficient coalition game model according to each node's Shapley value. The transferring process of the Markov states is used to simulate the process of forming coalitions. Based on the idea of Bargaining set, the concept of absorbing coefficient is given to control the transferring process. Experimental results show that the proposed model can be well used to prolong the WSN lifetime.