N-player medium access game for wireless data dissemination

In this paper we propose a game theoretic medium access strategy for data dissemination in wireless networks. In data dissemination scenarios, where the global target is the spreading of a particular content in a network, the main goal of the wireless nodes is twofold: to guarantee a low completion time, and to increase their battery lifetime. Hence, the existence of many active sources in the network implies conflicting situations, since the nodes have to balance a trade-off between proceeding the dissemination and saving energy. To model these conflicts, we introduce a n-player medium access game using energy-based utility functions. Both analytical and simulation results are provided to evaluate our proposed strategy.