Game of energy consumption balancing in heterogeneous sensor networks

In a multi-hop sensor network, sensors largely rely on other nodes as a traffic relay to communicate with targets that are not reachable by one hop. Depending on the topology and position of nodes, some sensors receive more relaying traffic and lose their energy faster. Such imbalanced energy consumption may lead to server problems like network partitioning. In this paper, we study the problem of energy consumption balancing (ECB) in heterogeneous sensor networks by assuming general any-to-any traffic pattern. We consider both factors of transmission power and forwarding load in measuring energy consumption. To find a solution, we formulate the problem as a strategic network formation game with a new utility function. We show that this game is guaranteed to converge to strongly connected topologies which have better ECB and bounded inefficiency. We propose a localized algorithm in which every node knows only about its k-hop neighbourhood. Through simulations on uniform and clustered networks with various densities, we show that the performance of our algorithm is comparable with global and centralized algorithms. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.