Bilateral Shapley Value Based Cooperative Gateway Selection in Congested Wireless Mesh Networks

In wireless mesh networks (WMNs), the achievable throughput of a mesh client to a gateway (GW) is limited by the minimum link capacity of the intermediate nodes. In instances when the intermediate nodes experience congestion due to large relay traffic, link failure etc., this throughput may drop below an acceptable level. Since the mesh topology implies multi-path routing capability, it is possible to satisfy the client service requirements by facilitating data traversal over multiple gateways (forming a coalition). Therefore, in this paper a game theoretic coalition formation algorithm is proposed that guarantees the minimum service requirements of clients. The algorithm is modeled as a cooperative game theory and incorporates Bilateral Shapley Value (BSV) to find the best coalition, whereupon a bargaining game theory is utilized to evaluate the throughput contribution of the member gateways. Such a game theoretic approach enables the proposed algorithm to offer a Pareto efficient solution that satisfies the minimum service requirements of the clients over dynamic network conditions. Performance at the proposed algorithm is evaluated using OMNET discrete event simulator.