Virtual Game-Based Energy Balanced Topology Control Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

In topology control (TC), game theory is an efficient approach to analyze the conflicting objectives of nodes to enable the topology with certain global properties in the presence of selfish nodes. But in many existing game-based TC algorithms, every node has to make others aware of its changes by transmitting the control information repeatedly, which results in much unnecessary energy waste and network lifetime reduction. To solve the problem, the concept of virtual game is introduced, which virtualizes the game process to avoid the repeated information exchange in the game process. In addition, considering that unbalanced distribution of energy consumption also restricts the network lifetime, a distributed Virtual Game-based Energy Balanced TC algorithm (VGEB) with incomplete information is proposed, which is mathematically analyzed. The analysis results show that the TC virtual game is a potential game and the virtual game algorithm can converge to the state of Nash Equilibrium, which is Pareto Optimal. Moreover, VGEB can easily construct the topology with a low information complexity of O(n) and the induced topology can maintain the network connectivity, where n is the number of nodes in network. Simulation results demonstrate that VGEB can effectively balance the nodes' energy consumption, greatly reduce the energy waste in the game process and has many other attractive topological features.