This thesis project addresses the problem of energy-efficient data dissemination from a source node to all other nodes in a wireless multi-hop network. Mahdi Mousavi et al. from the Communications Engineering Lab at TU Darmstadt have devised a decentralized algorithm towards this goal that is based on game theory [1]. While simulation results have shown that this mechanism significantly outperforms other conventional flooding mechanisms, its practical applicability still remains unexplored.

Goal

The goal of this thesis project is to design a practical protocol that runs the game theoretical algorithm in [1] and to evaluate its performance in a network simulation environment. The project main goals are:

  • Analyze the game theoretical algorithm [1] for limiting assumptions
  • Devise a practical protocol for broadcast tree construction that is based on [1]
  • Implement this protocol in a simulation environment (ns-3)
  • Evaluate the energy efficiency of the constructed broadcast tree in comparison to conventional flooding techniques while taking the protocol overhead into account

[1] Mahdi Mousavi, Hussein Al-Shatri, Matthias Wichtlhuber, David Hausheer and Anja Klein, “Energy-Efficient Data Dissemination in Ad Hoc Networks: Mechanism Design with Potential Game”, 2015 International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS), Brussels, 2015, pp. 616-620. doi: 10.1109/ISWCS.2015.7454421