A Potential Game Approach for Decentralized Resource Coordination in Coexisting IWNs

To meet the requirements of various emerging manufacturing applications, multiple Industrial Wireless Networks (IWNs) are employed to operate in the same region. However, the limited communication resources inevitably incur interference in the time and frequency domains, which is known as the coexistence problem. Existing centralized mechanisms suffer from a low computational efficiency in a large-scale network scenario, and the globally shared information cannot be fully obtained in practice. To this end, we first design an incomplete information sharing protocol to clarify the decentralized coordination among coexisting IWNs. We then formulate the coexistence problem as a non-cooperative game, which is proven to be a potential game. In addition, considering the deterministic deadlines of data transmissions in industrial applications, we propose a Deadline-aware Incomplete-Information-based Decentralized Resource Coordination (DIIDRC) algorithm. We also mathematically analyze that the DIIDRC algorithm converges to a collision-free optimal schedule in a resource-sufficient scenario or a nearly-optimal schedule in a resource-insufficient scenario. We conduct extensive simulations to verify the effectiveness of the DIIDRC algorithm. Evaluation results show that the DIIDRC algorithm has obvious superiorities over existing works in terms of the convergence rate and schedulable ratio.