Approximating Nash Equilibrium Uniqueness of Power Control In Practical WSNs

Transmission power has a major impact on link and communication reliability and network lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks. We study power control in a multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network where nodes' communication interfere with each other. Our objective is to determine each node's transmission power level that will reduce the communication interference and keep energy consumption to a minimum. We propose a potential game approach to obtain the unique equilibrium of the network transmission power allocation. The unique equilibrium is located in a continuous domain. However, radio transceivers accept only discrete values for transmission power level setting. We study the viability and performance of mapping the continuous solution from the potential game to the discrete domain required by the radio. We demonstrate the success of our approach through TOSSIM simulation when nodes use the Collection Tree Protocol for routing the data. Also, we show results of our method from the Indriya testbed. We compare it with the case where the motes use Collection Tree Protocol with the maximum transmission power.