Distributed cooperation in wireless sensor networks

We present a game-theoretic self-organizing approach for scheduling the radio activity of wireless sensor nodes. Our approach makes each node play a win-stay lose-shift (WSLS) strategy to choose when to schedule radio transmission, reception and sleeping periods. The proposed strategy relies only on local interactions with neighboring nodes, and is thus fully decentralized. This behavior results in shorter communication schedules, allowing to not only reduce energy consumption by reducing the wake-up cycles of sensor nodes, but also to decrease the data retrieval latency. We implement this WSLS approach in the OMNeT++ sensor network simulator where nodes are organized in three topologies — line, grid and random. We compare the performance of our approach to two state-of-the-art scheduling protocols, namely S-MAC and D-MAC, and show that the WSLS strategy brings significant gains in terms of energy savings, while at the same time reduces communication delays. In addition, we show that our approach performs particularly well in large, random topologies.