Cooperative Game Theory Approach for Energy-Efficient Node Clustering in Wireless Sensor Network

Energy consumption is one of the critical challenges in designing wireless sensor network (WSN) since it is typically composed of resource-constrained devices. Many studies have been proposed clustering to deal with energy conservation in WSN. Due to its predominance in coordinating the behaviors of many players, game theory has been considered for improving energy efficiency in WSN. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of cooperative game theoretic clustering (CGC) algorithm which employs cooperative game theory in a form of 3-agent cost sharing game for energy-efficient clustering in WSN. Furthermore, we compared its performance to a well-known traditional clustering method, low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH), in terms of network lifetime and stability, and total residual energy. The simulation results show that CGC has better performance compared to LEACH due to the cooperation among cluster heads in coalition. CGC has higher alive nodes with stability improvement of first node dies (FND) by 65%, and the improvement by 52.4% for half node dies (HND). However, with the increasing of the number of nodes, the performance of LEACH is getting better compared to CGC.