Power Control in Wireless Broadcast Networks using Game Theory

Broadcast is an important application in wireless networks, e.g. for video streaming, file distribution, or event notification. Wireless nodes are battery powered, their network lifetime depends on the energy consumption. Thus, energy efficiency is an important metric when designing broadcast protocols in infrastructureless and all-wireless networks. In this paper, we apply game theory to solve the minimum energy broadcast tree construction problem using power control by formulating the problem into a non-cooperative game. Our game-based broadcast protocols are decentralized in nature. We demonstrate that our game-based algorithms provide better performance than other known decentralized algorithms and the performance loss of our approach is small compared to a centralized solution.