Strategic Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Prolonging the network lifetime is a challenging problem in wireless sensor networks. Using additional mobile agents able to gather data from static sensor nodes reveals to be one of the convenient solutions in order to conserve static sensor nodes energy. In this paper, we focus on a conflictual situation between two Data Collectors (DCs) tending to gather maximum sensed data and deliver them to a sink node before a required deadline. A non-cooperative game is used to model this behavior and evaluate the performance of the gathering scheme when two DCs are competing with each other to gain more sensed data. Under this scheme, aggressive behavior is discouraged since each data gathering operation incurs sensor nodes energy decrease and data delivery delay increase.