QoS satisfaction games for spectrum sharing

Abstract

Today's wireless networks are facing tremendous growth and many applications have more demanding quality of service (QoS) requirements than ever before. However, there is only a finite amount of wireless resources (such as spectrum) that can be used to satisfy these demanding requirements. We present a general QoS satisfaction game framework for modeling the issue of distributed spectrum sharing to meet QoS requirements. Our study is motivated by the observation that finding globally optimal spectrum sharing solutions with QoS guarantees is NP hard. We show that the QoS satisfaction game has the finite improvement property, and the users can self-organize into a pure Nash equilibrium in polynomial time. By bounding the price of anarchy, we demonstrate that the worst case pure Nash equilibrium can be close to the global optimal solution when users' QoS demands are not too diverse.