Price of ignorance in dynamic topology control
Ramakant S. Komali, Petri Mähönen · 2009
In autonomous ad hoc networks, nodes may act in their self-interest to improve their performance, perhaps at the expense of other nodes', or even the overall network's, performance. Besides, nodes are often mobile and must contend with limited and obsolete information about the operating state of network during their decision-making. We examine topology control of ad hoc networks and analyze the impact of mobility, selfishness, and partial information on energy efficiency and network connectivity using tools from game theory. We develop a local topology control algorithm that uses the idea of maintaining connectivity of 1-hop neighborhoods. By examining the trade-off between network performance (energy efficiency) and the cost of cooperation (by exchanging control messages) it turns out that mobility and selfishness are, in some sense, synergistic features in information-constrained networks. Such networks consume least energy when nodes are more mobile and have significantly less connectivity information.