The need to achieve energy efficiency in machine-to-machine (M2M) communications has been a driver of the use of coalition game-based cooperative communication schemes. The proposed schemes have shown good energy-efficient performance results in the recent past. However, sustaining cooperation amongst coalition games of M2M devices from different network-operating authorities requires appropriate incentives. A review of the literature demonstrates that a limited number of contributions have considered the use of coalition games with incentives in M2M communications. In this paper, an energy-efficient coalition game with incentives in M2M communications is proposed. This work considers a Sierpinski triangle technique to partition M2M devices into multiple networks of hierarchical zones. Based on the constructed zones, a contract-modelled incentive is invoked to stimulate multihop transmissions between devices up to the BS/sink. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed approach is on average 10% more energy efficient than the closely related existing algorithm, the coalition game theoretical clustering (CGTC).

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