Fairness in Sequential Estimation: A Cooperative Game Theoretic Solution for WSNs

In this paper, the problem of sequential estimation in a wireless sensor network (WSN) is formulated in a cooperative game theoretic framework. This framework allows addressing the issue of fair resource allocation for sequential estimation task at the Fusion center (FC) in a WSN as a solution of a cooperative game. We propose a simple game theoretic solution to the problem of power allocation for sensor nodes that are subjected to power constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed solution has the same performance trend (in terms of the estimator quality at the FC) as when all nodes transmit at their maximum powers, while our proposed solution leads to an overall improvement of the network lifetime.