ThingsGame: when sending data rate depends on the data usefulness in IoT networks

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that aims at making objects in the world to be connected through Internet. IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) is considered as one of the common protocol stack suite for IoT applications. The 6LoWPAN network is implemented on the top of IEEE 802.15.4 standard in order to alleviate the challenges of connecting resource constrained objects to the Internet. In such a network, nodes are competing to send their sensed data as high as possible in a selfish way. However, high network data traffic degrades network performance and quality of service aspects, e.g., data sending rate, network latency and reliability and energy consumption. In this paper, we formulate the sending rate adjustments as a non-cooperative game where each node is modeled as a player in the game and demands high data sending rate in a selfish way. The basic idea of our scheme is to adjust the data sending rate according to the preferences of nodes to send high data rate, the quality of data in terms of similarity and nodes priorities in the targeted IoT application. We then prove the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium before computing the optimal sending rate using Lagrange multipliers and KarushKuhnTucker (KKT) conditions. We called our game-based scheme ThingsGame. We validate and evaluate ThingsGame scheme in the IoT operating system Contiki OS using Cooja simulator. Simulation results show that ThingsGame improves significantly network performance in terms of overall throughput, energy consumption, number of lost packets, as compared to the Selfish way scheme.