Energy-efficient data dissemination in Ad Hoc networks: Mechanism design with potential game

In this paper, a mechanism is designed based on game theory which aims at minimizing the transmit power in a multi-hop wireless broadcast network. There are multiple nodes in a network and among them, there is a source node which has a common message for all other nodes. For the sake of energy efficiency, the source's message should be forwarded to all nodes by a collaboration between different nodes in a multi-hop manner. Minimizing the total transmit power in the network is the goal of this paper. To this end, the nodes in the network are modeled as rational players and a mechanism is designed based on a potential game model. In this game, the action set of each node changes during the game based on the action of other players. Besides, it is proposed to exploit the weakly dominant strategy at the nodes such that the nodes change their actions even if a new action with the same cost exists. Simulation results show that the proposed decentralized mechanism significantly outperforms other conventional decentralized algorithms. Moreover, when the network is not dense, our algorithm can outperform centralized algorithms on average.