Game theoretic channel assignment for wireless sensor networks with geographic routing

Multi-channel wireless sensor networks exploit the capability of sensor nodes to tune its radio over different channels to communicate. The main goal of multi-channel communication is to achieve improved throughput, delivery ratio and cause/suffer less interference in the network. However, optimally assigning channels has been shown to be a hard problem. Thus, recently game theory has been used to design a protocol, termed GBCA (Game-Based Channel Allocation), that is able to exploit topology and routing information (TIRI) for assigning sub-optimally the channels to the nodes in a distributed way. However, GBCA only works with static routing. On the other hand, geographic routing, which is a popular well-studied routing technique in wireless sensor networks, is a dynamic routing algorithm. It uses the positions of nodes to find on demand the next hop for the packet. Therefore, GBCA can not be readily applied in networks that employ geographic routing. To address this issue, we propose a modification to GBCA, which we termed GBCA-G, that is suitable for wireless sensor networks that make use of geographic routing algorithms.