Multi-player Game Theoretic MAC Strategies for Energy Efficient Data Dissemination

The existence of multiple active sources in wireless data dissemination scenarios raises considerable channel access issues. Although the overall goal in the network is the successful accomplishment of the dissemination, the individual wireless nodes aim at maximizing their battery lifetime by minimizing their particular energy consumption. Considering thus the self-centered behavior of the nodes, we anticipate to design Medium Access Control (MAC) policies in order to provide the terminals with energy efficient solutions without compromising the dissemination completion time. In this paper, we propose non-cooperative game theoretic channel access strategies by estimating equilibrium points that achieve balance between conserving energy and completing the data dissemination. In particular, we present two different MAC strategies: i) a distributed approach for ad-hoc networks, and ii) a coordinated approach for infrastructure networks, where a central controller is sporadically used to accelerate the data dissemination. In addition, network-coded transmissions are considered to eliminate the need of control packets exchange. Both analytical and simulation results are provided to evaluate our proposed schemes, demonstrating the significant gains that game theoretic techniques can bring to the network performance compared to standardized solutions.