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

In this paper, we focus on the problem of how to strike a balance between the QoS provisioning and the energy consumption when a cooperative communication scheme is applied in a clustered wireless sensor network. We characterize this tradeoff by a multi-variable optimization problem, with the goals of jointly maximizing 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 (CNs). For the former one, the optimal long-haul transmit power solution is presented based on the Lambert W function, only with the knowledge of statistic channel state information. Moreover, a dynamic coalition formation game theoretical framework is modeled to solve the latter one. A corresponding algorithm is proposed by using a dynamic coalition formation process based on the best-reply process with trial opportunity. Through this algorithm, a stable coalition structure with a core allocation can be obtained, which can show the optimal set of assisting CNs. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.