Game Theory is a set of mathematical concepts to study the inter

communicative decision trouble between the nodes in a network. It also helps in

predicting the possible outcome of interactive decision problems occurring in a
network. The well feasible outcome for any decision process is Nash
Equilibrium. A Nash equilibrium is an output of a process (game) where none of
the node in a network has more benifits to make it one sided or greedy. Game
theory can be applied in my fields like sociology , political science ,psychology,
biology ,evolution. In recent years it has drawn plenty of interest from computer
scientist because of its use in artificial intelligence, computer network and
cybernetics. Because of its unselfishness it has gained a lot of popularity in
solving communication and networking issues. The problems may be like
congestion control, routing, power control and other issues in wired and wireless
communications systems and many more.
In non-cooperative game theory nodess usually make some assumptions

All node has one or more well-specified strategies.

All has possible combinations of strategy that leads to an optimum
response ( like may win, lose or draw) in a specific game.
All node has a specified payoff for each optimum response that it
gives/comes.
All node in a network will choose a strategy that will give it a better play
off.

Application of concept of game theory to analyze the

performance/efficiency/robustness of wireless networks has many challenges
Rationality is assumed
The Realistic scenarios may be in the need of complex model
Utility functions choice
Design of Mechanism
Mapping nodes in the network.

Advantages of using game theory for analyzing wireless networks

Can be used in investigating the steady state of distributed systems

and also make the result of an individual node both in the interest of the
system and its own.
In computer networks, a node often needs to take its action based on
some other different layers to optimize its own performance but this
could hurt the performances of that particular layers. So in this situation
game theory can provide an optimization to overall protocol stacks
performance.
It will completely/partially remove the selfishness.

Network Games:
Game theory can be applied in modelling the computer networks at
various layers. At every levels a game can formulated to optimize the
performance of a network. The main aim of these games would be to remove the

selfishness of a node. Since this is the main problem for the behaviour of the
overall network performance. One case where the node always refuse to forward
data packets from other node which can create unnecessary partition in the
network, and hence limit the connectivity of the network.

MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks:

In wireless sensor networks communication takes between several layers. One of
the layer is MAC layer which enables the successful operation of networks, it
tries to avoid collisions so that two interfering nodes do not transmit at the same
time. The main goal to design a distinctive MAC protocols is to provide high
throughput and Quality of service(qos).But in traditional MAC protocols a good
amount of energy gets wasted due to idle listening, collision, protocol overhead,
and over-hearing.

Incomplete cooperative game:

As mentioned before energy efficiency of MAC protocol in WSN is
very sensitive to nodes competing to access the required channel channel. And
this makes MAC protocol to estimate the different parameters like collision
probability, transmission probability, etc., by identifying channel. Since
dynamics of WSN keeps on changing due to different reasons like mobility of
nodes, fusion of some new nodes, and failing out of some exhausted node. Also,
guessing about the other adjacent nodes information is too complex, as each
and every node in a network takes a distributed approach to estimate current
state of networks. Hence these could the reasons that incomplete cooperative
game could be a perfect candidate to optimize the performance of MAC protocol
in sensor networks.

Improved back off:

IB Mechanism is very simple scheme to integrate with any energy efficient
MAC protocols for WSNs.As this method doesnt require any hard method to
estimate the number of nodes. In addition, IB can easily accommodate the
changing dynamics of WSNs.

Mechanism:
It uses a small and fixed contention window. Here nodes choose a nonuniform geometrically rising probability distribution for picking a transmission
slot in the contention window. Nodes which are executing pick a slot in the range
of (1, CW) with the probability distribution say p. The value of cw is fixed. Below
graph shows the probability distribution P where the higher slot numbers have
higher probability to get selected by nodes compared to lower slot numbers in
the graph. Or in a way we can say that start node select a higher slot number for
its CW by estimating large population of active nodes (n) and keep sensing the
channel status. If none of the nodes transmits in the starting slots then each
node adjust its estimation of competing nodes by multiplicatively increasing its
transmission probability for the next slot selection cycle. And the process to find
an active node happens in iterative fashion and allows the competition to happen
at geometricallydecreasing values of n which is within the CW. In contrast to the
probability distribution P, in uniform distribution all the competing nodes have
the same probability of transmitting in a randomly chosen time slot . IB scheme
doesnt use any timer suspension to save energy and reduce latency in case if a
collision occurs. The only drawback is fairness, however for WsNs fairness is
not a problem since the overall network performance is more important rather
than an individual node and all nodes will not be having data to send all the
time.Hence Using IB may give us the optimum network performance as it
reduces the collision to minimum .