AbstractsComputer Science

A primary concern in the operation of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is the issue of balancing energy consumption and lifetime maximization. This dissertation addresses the problem of unbalanced energy consumption in WSNs by designing traffic load balancing geographical routing protocols. In order to provide energy balance; two decentralized, scalable and stable routing protocols are proposed: Game Theoretic Energy Balanced (GTEB) routing protocol for WSNs and three dimensional (3D) Game Theoretic Energy Balance (3D-GTEB) routing protocol for WSNs. GTEB were designed to fit with WSNs deployed in 2D space, while 3D-GTEB designed to work with WSNs deployed in 3D terrain. Both protocols are built based on balancing energy consumption into region level and node level using different game theory in each level. In the first level, evolutionary game theory was used to balance the energy consumption in various packet forwarding sub-regions, while in the second level classical game theory was used to balance the energy consumption in forwarding sub-region nodes. 3D-GTEB benefits from utilizing the third coordinate of nodes' locations to achieve better and accurate routing decision with low network overhead. The protocols where evaluated analytically and experimentally under realistic simulation environment. Thus, the results show not only combining evolutionary and classical game theories are applicable to WSNs, but also they achieve significantly better performance in terms of energy usage, load spreading, and packet delivery ratio under different network scenarios when compared to the state-of-art protocols. Moreover, further investigation is made to evaluate the effectiveness of using game theories by comparing GTEB with three random test protocols. The results demonstrated that the GTEB and 3D-GTEB are prolonged the network lifetime from 33% to 85%, and provided better delivery ratio form 26% to 52% as compared with other three random test protocols and three similar state-of-art routing algorithms.