A Game Theory Based Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Personal Area Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the presence of congestion can increase the ratio of packet loss, energy consumption and reduce of the network throughput. Especially, this situation will be more complex in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, which is composed of thousands of heterogeneous nodes. In this paper, we address the congestion problem between child and parent nodes in RPL-enabled networks, which typically consist of low power and resource constraint devices. We use game theory strategy to design a parent-change procedure which decides how nodes changing their next hop node toward sink to mitigate the effect of network congestion. Comparing to the Contiki RPL implementation, the simulation results show that our protocol can achieve more than twofold improvement in packet loss rate and throughput with similar average hop count.