An IoT Game with Heterogeneous Communication Nodes

The paper considers a network's communication, where nodes, communicating with a base station, could differ by the access to information they have on their fading channel gain (channel state). Specifically, some of the nodes know their channel states exactly, while other nodes have only statistical state information. Such difference can be motivated by the fact that the channel gain is a function of the distance to the receiver, and some of the nodes might not know their own location, meanwhile, the others might have complete information about their own location via global positioning system (GPS). This scenario is common in IoT networks, particularly those situated in remote or challenging environments where GPS signals may be unreliable or inaccessible. The problem is modeled by a Bayesian game with latency as a communication metric. A novel approach is developed to solve such a heterogeneous problem by access to information in closed form for any number of channel states even for the continuum of them. The uniqueness of equilibrium is proven which reflects the usability of using latency metric and stability in communication based on the suggested communication protocol even when the nodes might differ by access to information about channel states. The equilibrium strategies are numerically illustrated.