Noncooperative carrier sense game in wireless networks

  • Authors:
  • Kyung-Joon Park;Jennifer C. Hou;Tamer Basar;Hwangnam Kim

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL;Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL;School of Electrical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The performance of carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) wireless networks heavily depends on the level of spatial reuse, i.e., how many concurrent transmissions are allowed. Spatial reuse is primarily determined by physical carrier sense, and a key parameter for physical carrier sense is the carrier sense threshold. Our focus is on how to control the carrier sense threshold for improving network performance. We present a noncooperative game-theoretic framework, which leads to a fully distributed algorithm for tuning the carrier sense threshold. We introduce a utility function of each node, which is a nondecreasing concave function of the carrier sense threshold. A pricing function is further introduced to mitigate severe interference among nodes. The cost function is defined as the difference between the pricing and the utility functions. We prove that the noncooperative carrier sense game admits a unique Nash equilibrium (NE) under some technical conditions. We derive sufficient conditions that ensure the convergence of the synchronous and asynchronous update algorithms. Based on the analysis, we propose a fully distributed algorithm, entitled noncooperative carrier sense update algorithm (NCUA). Our simulation study indicates that NCUA outperforms standard CSMA with respect to the per-node throughput by 10-50%.