Transmission scheme selection based on coalition formation game in wireless sensor networks

Due to the constrained energy, energy efficiency becomes the primary objective in the design of wireless sensor networks, where extending network lifetime is considered as one of the energy efficient techniques. In addition, the advantage of the cooperative MIMO scheme over the non-cooperative SISO scheme doesn´t always exist, if considering the cost in term of the addition overhead. So we should focus on how to select a proper transmission scheme so as to achieve the energy efficiency. For this purpose, we model the transmission scheme selection problem as a non-transferable coalition formation game with the characteristic function based on the network lifetime. Further, we propose an algorithm using a simple merge-and-split rule based on the Pareto order to obtain the final coalitional structure which can reflect which transmission scheme is exploited, and which cluster nodes are chosen to collaborate with the cluster head. Furthermore, we give and analyze the properties of the proposed game model and algorithm, respectively. We also provide extensive simulation results which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed game model and algorithm.