A Multi-Leader-Follower Game Model for Resource Allocation in Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks

Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks (WSANs) enable prominent services in different domains including smart cities, industry, and agriculture. These services may demand high quality of service (QoS) requirements in terms of data rate, throughput, latency, which can be challenging regarding the specific characteristics of such networks (e.g., a huge number of connected devices, the communication mode, limited resources, etc.). In this paper, we focus on the transmission power allocation problem to match the QoS requirements in terms of data rate maximization and interference minimization. We propose a game theory-based channel selection and transmission power determination scheme in WSANs. As a first step, we formulate the problem as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. This problem is a tradeoff between the maximization of the data rate of each node and the minimization of the transmission power to reduce the interference ratio. The second step consists of the proposition of a multi-leader-follower game model to determine the transmission channel and power with consideration of data rate, packet deadlines, and fairness between nodes. Finally, we perform extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed scheme performance.