A Cooperative Communication Scheme Based on Coalition Formation Game in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work, we study the problem of how to strike a balance between the QoS provisioning and the energy efficiency when a cooperative communication scheme is applied to a clustered wireless sensor network. Specifically, we first characterize the tradeoff by a multi-variable optimization problem, with the goal of balancing the outage performance and the network lifetime. Then, we horizontally decompose the problem into the concatenation of two subproblems: i) the long-haul transmit power per sensor node, and ii) the set of assisting cluster nodes. For the former one, an optimal long-haul transmit power solution is proposed based on the Lambert W function. The latter one is modeled as a coalition formation game, where the characteristic function is designed based on the combination of the former subproblem´s results. Furthermore, an optimal algorithm is proposed by using a dynamic coalition formation process based on the best-reply process with trial opportunity. Extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.