Applications of game theory to mobile ad hoc networks: Node spreading potential game

Sustaining a complete and accurate information about MANET nodes is often impractical due to dynamic topology, lack of centralized authority, decentralized architecture and heterogeneous nodes in MANETs. Main concerns for MANET performance are power consumption, topology control, spectrum sharing, and localization, all of which are intensified by node mobility. Another inherent characteristic of mobile nodes in MANETs is that they have limited or no cooperation among themselves, and their motivations are often selfish with conflicting individual interests. We present a distributed game for obtaining a uniform node distribution among the MANET nodes over a given geographical territory. We show that our potential game can be an effective mechanism for distributed tasks such as uniform node distribution.