Game-theoretic medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In the traditional medium access control (MAC) protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy consumption is traded for throughput and delay. However, in future WSNs, throughput and delay performance had better not be sacrificed for energy conservation. Here first, an incompletely cooperative game-theoretic heuristic-based constraint optimisation framework is introduced to achieve the goals of throughput, delay and energy conservation simultaneously. Then a simplified game-theoretic MAC (G-MAC) protocol is presented, which can be easily implemented in WSNs. Simulation results show that compared with two typical MAC protocols for WSNs, sensor MAC and timeout MAC, G-MAC can increase system throughput, and decrease delay and packet-loss-rate, while maintaining relatively low energy consumption.