A Game Theoretical Approach for Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Selfish Nodes

In ad hoc networks, a significant amount of energy available to devices is utilized in network management operations. Since devices have limited energy resources, therefore, they drop data packets of other nodes to reduce their energy consumption. This selfish behaviour increases number of retransmissions over the link which increases energy consumption of the source node, introduces time delays, and degrades throughput of the network. Although conventional distributed topology control solutions minimize energy utilization of the nodes by adjustment of transmission power, however, selfish behaviour by devices introduce additional complexity in design which make topology control a challenging task. In this paper, we proposed Energy Efficient Topology Control Algorithm (EETCA) using game theoretical approach, in which, utility of the node depends on selfishness of the neighbors, link traffic rate, and link length. In decision-making step, nodes remove the links with other nodes that have high drop rate under the condition that network remains connected. We show that Nash Equilibrium point of the proposed game results in Pareto optimal network topology. We compare results of EETCA with Optimum (OPT) and Minimum Least Power Path Tree (MLPT) algorithms presented in literature. We carried our simulations under multiple sources scenario which show that EETCA outperforms previous approaches when number of nodes in the network increases. Furthermore, we simulate the performance of Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol under EETCA topology and compare it with MLPT and OPT topologies. The results show that the ad hoc network constructed using proposed solution substantially improves throughput of AODV routing protocol as compared to MLPT and OPT topology control algorithms.