Mobile-Aware Topology Control Potential Game: Equilibrium and Connectivity

Topology control (TC) is one of the most important techniques for connection establishments between entities in Internet of Things, especially in the scenario where there are no fixed infrastructures such as prompt sensor deployments, emergency communications, and vehicle–vehicle communications. The goal of TC is to assign per-node transmission power such that the resulting topology is energy efficient and also satisfies some global graph property such as connectivity. Among the literatures, however, few efforts focused on the issue of TC with interest-independent nodes. Besides, in a distributed mobile networks, nodes’ mobility can cause the dynamic network topology. As a result, nodes need to execute the TC algorithm periodically. To jointly consider nodes’ selfishness and mobility, we propose a potential game and mobility aware TC (PGMATC) framework based on mobility traces and potential game, where a practical utility function is designed by considering the expected utility for a TC period. Extensive simulations driven by actual data demonstrate that PGMATC can improve the network connectivity with quite a limited increase in energy consumption, compared with the traditional TC algorithms.