# Game theory-based Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Comparative Survey
## 1 Introduction
Resources such as energy, battery power, bandwidth, and communication speed are considered vital in WSNs. Among all these resources, the most vital resource is energy, because it is directly related to network lifetime and performance. Hence, routing metrics like end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, network lifetime, and routing establishment time should also be considered while designing routing protocols for WSNs. Using game theory to design the routing protocol for WSNs is a superior method. Owing to the unique nature of WSNs, game theory can be considered an attractive and robust solution for designing a routing protocol that can eventually lead to a pragmatic and agile network. The rational behavior of players makes game theory applicable in system operations analysis in self-organizing and decentralized networks. Several existing works that used game theory to design routing protocols for WSNs promise better performances than other existing protocols in terms of end-to-end delay, network lifetime, packet delivery ratio, energy efficiency, and route establishment time. To the best of our knowledge, three prior survey papers [19; 20; 21] have covered game theory-based routing protocols in WSNs. In [19], four protocols were reviewed: competitive routing with polynomial cost [22], flow and routing control policy with multiple competitive users [23], analysis of a multi-stream game for multipath routing [24], and the Nash equilibrium for combined flow control and routing [25]. In [20], a collaborative, energy, and information aware routing algorithm using game theory [26] was reviewed. In [21], four protocols were reviewed: prolonging the network lifetime via nodal energy balancing in heterogeneous WSNs [27], game theory-based energy-balanced routing protocol for WSNs [28], game theory used for reliable routing modeling in WSNs [29], and predictable energy-aware routing based on dynamic game theory in WSNs [30]. The latest routing protocols [31; 32; 33; 34; 35; 36; 37; 38; 39; 40; 41; 42; 43; 44; 45] published after 2012 will be surveyed and discussed in more detail in this survey. Apart from [19], [20], and [21], two other survey papers have briefly discussed game theory-based routing protocols, even though their focus was not on game theory. In [46], three routing protocols based on game theory were critically analyzed, but they were published before 2009. Because our target is to review the latest protocols, we do not review these. Even though [41] and [42] are reviewed in [47], we have included them in our survey because they are two of the major papers published in recent years that cover the implementation of the cluster-based WSNs using evolutionary game theory (EGT). We have considered three criteria for choosing the papers that have been incorporated in this survey. They are the publication year, journals/conferences where the papers have been published, and the implications of the three different types of game theories. This paper aims at presenting a thorough study of the most recent works, therefore, only the routing protocols published after 2012 were considered. We considered papers from reputable journals and conferences, which were collected from famous scientific databases. Game theory can be classified into three types: cooperative, noncooperative, and evolutionary game theory. A more detailed explanation will be described in the following section. A routing protocol may become considerably conducive for a specific application just because it has a different game approach. For example, EGT is sufficiently suitable for clustering-based routing protocols. Table 1 lists the limitations of the existing surveys of [19; 20; 21; 46; 47].