Interest, energy and physical-aware coalition formation and resource allocation in smart IoT applications

In this paper, the problem of coalition formation among Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication type devices and the resource management problem is addressed. Each M2M device is characterized by its energy availability, as well as by differentiated interests to communicate with other devices based on the Internet of Things (IoT) application that they jointly serve. Physical ties among devices also exist based on their physical distance proximity and communication channel quality. Those three factors: energy availability, interest and physical ties, are considered into the coalition formation process and the coalition-head selection. Each M2M device is associated with a holistic utility function, which appropriately represents its degree of satisfaction with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) prerequisites fulfillment. Given the created coalitions among the M2M devices, a distributed power control framework is proposed towards determining each M2M device's optimal transmission power in order to fulfill its QoS prerequisites. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated via modeling and simulation and its superiority compared to other state of the art approaches is illustrated.