摘要

Because of energy-constraint, it is an attractive problem to select energy-efficient paths from source nodes to sink for data gathering in wireless ad hoc networks. Cooperative communication is a promising mechanism to reduce transmit energy in such kind of case. One of the fundamental assumptions for cooperative communication is that each node should be unselfish, responsible, and willing to forwarding data he has received. However, in energy-constrained environment, because of limited energy, each node hates participating in data transmission without any incentive and tries to avoid forwarding data (this behavior is selfish). In this paper, a utility function is proposed to stimulate nodes to behave unselfishly. We prove that it is a Nash Equilibrium when nodes work in an unselfish manner. Also, we show that the selection of forwarding nodes and relay nodes for data transmission is a NP-hard problem even when nodes behave unselfishly. A heuristic algorithm (Algorithm for Node Selection Problem, ANSP) is provided to solve this selection problem. We also prove the convergence of this algorithm. The analysis shows that this algorithm can reach the approximate performance ratio of 2a <...(1+alpha), where alpha is the maximal ratio of two power consumptions on two adjacent links in the network. The numerical results show that in a 100 node network, if nodes behave unselfishly, they will obtain a better utility, and more energy will be saved. The average saved energy when each node takes a selfish behavior, is 52.5% less than the average when nodes behave in an unselfish manner.

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