Game-Theoretic Control for Actuator Coordination in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

In wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs), the actuators often need to coordinate their actions in response to an event occurrence. A good coordination among actuators can balance energy consumption, prolong network lifetime, and improve real-time performance of WSANs. However, it can be challenging to determine the best cooperating team of actuators in WSANs. In this paper, distributed game-based control algorithms for actuator-actuator coordination are proposed. The game is played between multiple actuators each time an action task needs to be performed in an event area. Hence, the task allocation and execution problem in WSANs can be transformed into a utility assignment problem in a multi-player coalition game. The proposed algorithms implement effective task execution by determining the best cooperating work team among the actuators through a game theoretic strategy. The algorithms are evaluated in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime and task completion time.