Incentive mechanism for selfish nodes in wireless sensor networks based on evolutionary game

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is made up of a mass of nodes with the character of self-organizing, multi-hop and limited resources. The normal operation of the network calls for cooperation among the nodes. However, there are some nodes that may choose selfish behavior when considering their limited resources such as energy, storage space and so on. The whole network will be paralyzed and unable to provide the normal service if most of the nodes do not forward data packages and take selfish actions in the network. In this paper, we adopt a dynamic incentive mechanism which suits wireless sensor networks based on the evolutionary game. The mechanism emphasizes the nodes adjust strategies forwardly and passively to maximize the fitness, making the population in the wireless sensor network converge to a cooperative state ultimately and promoting the selfish nodes cooperating with each other such that the network could offer normal service. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed model has better feasibility and effectiveness. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.