Distributed power allocation for cooperative localization: A potential game approach

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the availability of position information is a critical problem for many commercial and military applications. Network cooperation between agents can improve the localization accuracy but the power consumption will increase at the same time. Then the optimal trade-off between localization accuracy and power consumption for cooperation is a challenging task. In this paper, we investigate the problem of distributed power allocation for cooperative localization in WSNs localization systems, using a potential game approach. First, we propose a local altruistic power allocation game, in which each agent not only consider localization accuracy and power consumption of itself but also localization accuracy of its neighbors. Then, we prove that the proposed game is an exact potential game with at least one pure Nash equilibrium (NE). Moreover, the ε-equilibrium solution as a refinement of NE can be reached by better response dynamics. Numerical results show that the proposed strategies can give an instructional trade-off between power consumption and localization accuracy for cooperation.