Cooperative Data Exchange for Wireless Networks: Delay-aware and Energy-efficient approaches. (Echange coopératif des données pour les réseaux sans fil)

With significantly growing number of smart low-power devices during recent years, the issue of energy efficiency has taken an increasingly essential role in the communication systems’ design. This thesis aims at designing distributed and energy efficient transmission schemes for wireless networks using game theory and instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) which is a promising network coding subclass. We study the cooperative data exchange (CDE) scenario in which all devices cooperate with each other by exchanging network coded packets until all of them receive all the required information. In fact, enabling the IDNC-based CDE setting brings several challenges such us how to extend the network lifetime and how to reduce the number of transmissions in order to satisfy urgent delay requirements. Therefore, unlike most of existing works concerning IDNC, we focus not only on the decoding delay, but also the consumed energy. First, we investigate the IDNC-based CDE problem within small fully connected networks across energy-constrained devices and model the problem using the cooperative game theory in partition form. We propose a distributed merge-and-split algorithm to allow the wireless nodes to self-organize into independent disjoint coalitions in a distributed manner. The proposed algorithm guarantees reduced energy consumption and minimizes the delay in the resulting clustered network structure. We do not only consider the transmission energy, but also the computational energy consumption. Furthermore, we focus on the mobility issue and we analyse how, in the proposed framework, nodes can adapt to the dynamic topology of the network. Thereafter, we study the IDNC-based CDE problem within large-scale partially connected networks. We considerate that each player uses no longer his maximum transmission power, rather, he controls his transmission range dynamically. In fact, we investigate multi-hop CDE using the IDNC at decentralized wireless nodes. In such model, we focus on how these wireless nodes can cooperate in limited transmission ranges without increasing the IDNC delay nor their energy consumption. For that purpose, we model the problem using a two-stage game theoretical framework. We first model the power control problem using non-cooperative game theory where users jointly choose their desired transmission power selfishly in order to reduce their energy consumption and their IDNC delay. The optimal solution of this game allows the players at the next stage to cooperate with each other through limited transmission ranges using cooperative game theory in partition form. Thereafter, a distributed multihop merge-and-split algorithm is defined to form coalitions where players maximize their utilities in terms of decoding delays and energy consumption. The solution of the proposed framework determines a stable feasible partition for the wireless nodes with reduced interference and reasonable complexity. We demonstrate that the co-operation between nodes in the multihop cooperative scheme achieves a significant minimization of the energy consumption with respect to the most stable cooperative scheme in maximum transmission range without hurting the IDNC delay.