Cooperative game theoretic online routing scheme for wireless network managements

During wireless network operations, a widely used performance issue is energy efficiency. Along with the energy efficiency, another desirable property is load balancing. In this study, a new integrated routing scheme is proposed; it is composed of path setup and packet distribution algorithms. Owing to the online self-adjustment technique, the path setup algorithm can adaptively estimate link costs and establish routing paths. Based on the Shapley value approach, the proposed packet distribution algorithm can provide a fair and efficient solution for the packet forwarding problem. Under widely different and diversified network situations, this collaborative approach can offer a well-balanced network performance. The most important novelties of the proposed scheme are its flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness to current traffic conditions. Through simulation results, we can see the superiority of the proposed scheme whereas other existing schemes cannot offer such an attractive performance. The remaining energy ratio, network throughput, packet loss probability and average energy-consumption ratio are improved by about 5%, 10%, 15% and 20%, respectively, than the existing schemes.