Energy-efficiency in Decentralized Wireless Networks: A Game-theoretic Approach inspired by Evolutionary Biology

TL;DR

This paper investigates how simple local rules inspired by evolutionary biology can promote cooperation among nodes in decentralized wireless networks, leading to improved energy efficiency without complex algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a biologically inspired, simple rule-based approach to foster cooperation in wireless networks, contrasting with existing complex algorithmic methods.

Findings

Local rules can induce cooperative behavior in networks.

Cooperation improves overall energy efficiency.

Simple fitness evaluation suffices for emergent cooperation.

Abstract

Energy efficiency is gaining importance in wireless communication networks which have nodes with limited energy supply and signal processing capabilities. We present a numerical study of cooperative communication scenarios based on simple local rules. This is in contrast to most of the approaches in the literature which enforce cooperation by using complex algorithms and require strategic complexity of the network nodes. The approach is motivated by recent results in evolutionary biology which suggest that, if certain mechanism is at work, cooperation can be favoured by natural selection, i. e. even selfish actions of the individual nodes can lead to emergence of cooperative behaviour in the network. The results of the simulations in the context of wireless communication networks verify these observations and indicate that uncomplicated local rules, followed by simple fitness evaluation, can generate network behaviour which yields global energy efficiency.