A Coalitional Game Approach for Packet Delivery in Mobile Adhoc Network

A coalitional game is residential to study the actions of the rational mobile nodes for supportive packet delivery. We consider the problem of supportive packet delivery to mobile nodes in a cross wireless mobile network, where both wired and wireless network communications are used. A group of mobile nodes makes a conclusion to join or to leave a coalition based on their creature payoffs . The individual payoff of each mobile node is a function of the usual delivery delay for packets transmitted to the mobile node from a base station and the cost incur by this mobile node for relay packets to other mobile nodes. We propose a solution based on a coalition formation among mobile nodes to cooperatively deliver packets among these mobile nodes in the similar coalition. To discover the payoff of each mobile node, a continuous time Markov chain model is formulated and the expected cost and packet delivery postponement are obtained when the mobile node is in a coalition. Because both the expected cost and packet delivery delay depend on the possibility that each mobile node will aid other mobile nodes in the same coalition to forward packets to the destination mobile node in the same coalition, a bargaining model game is used to find the best helping probabilities. Behind the payoff of every mobile node is obtained, we discover the resolutions of the coalitional game which are the constant coalitions. A distributed algorithm is reachable to obtain the constant coalitions and a Markov-chain-based analysis is used to estimate the constant coalitional structures obtained from the distributed algorithm. Performance estimate results show that when the constant coalitions are formed, the mobile nodes realize a higher payoff . With a coalition formation, the mobile nodes achieve superior payoff than that when every mobile node acts alone.