Differential game for resource allocation in energy harvesting sensor networks

In this paper, we consider power control and data scheduling in an energy-harvesting (EH) multi-hop wireless-sensor-network (WSN). The network consists of M sensor nodes aiming to send their data to a sink node. Each sensor node has a battery of limited capacity to save the harvested energy and a buffer of limited size to store both the sensed and relayed data from neighboring nodes, each sensor node can exchange information within its neighborhood using single-hop transmission. Our goal is to develop a distributed algorithm that adaptively changes the transmitted data and power according to the traffic load and available energy such that the sensed data are received at the sink node. In this sense, a differential-game (DG) framework is proposed to efficiently utilize the available harvested energy and balance the buffer of all sensor nodes. The open-loop receding horizon Nash equilibrium is used as a solution to the proposed EH-WSN DG. Simulation results demonstrate the merits of the proposed approach. Index Terms-Wireless sensor network, energy harvesting, differential game, open-loop Nash equilibrium.