Sleep Control Game for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), each node controls its sleep to reduce energy consumption without sacrificing message latency. In this paper we apply the game theory, which is a powerful tool that explains how each individual acts for his or her own economic benefit, to analyze the optimal sleep schedule for sensor nodes. We redefine this sleep control game as a modified version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. In the sleep control game, each node decides whether or not it wakes up for the cycle. Payoff functions of the sleep control game consider the expected traffic volume, network conditions, and the expected packet delay. According to the payoff function, each node selects the best wake-up strategy that may minimize the energy consumption and maintain the latency performance. To investigate the performance of our algorithm, we apply the sleep control game to X-MAC, which is one of the recent WSN MAC protocols. Our detailed packet level simulations confirm that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the energy consumption by removing unnecessary wake-up operations without loss of the latency performance.