Neighbor Selection Game in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In wireless ad hoc networks, there is no infrastructure to enforce cooperation between nodes. As a result, nodes may act selfishly when running network protocols to conserve their energy resources as much as possible. In this paper, we consider the “neighbor selection” game in which each individual node tries to selfishly choose its neighborhood such that its own energy consumption is optimized. We first focus on a simplified version of this game where nodes know their transmission power before participating in the game. After analyzing the problem, we propose a couple of distributed algorithms to find stable topologies using two kinds of global and local connectivity information. We then take into account the general case where the transmission powers are unknown variables and should be determined during the game. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through simulations.