Noncooperative QoS support in an Ad Hoc WLAN

Abstract

QoS support entails fair arbitration, efficient assignment, and firm admission schemes guaranteeing specified parameters for transfer of QoS-sensitive traffic. Even if deployed in ad hoc WLANs, such schemes need not be adhered to by noncooperative stations. Using a game-theoretic approach we outline QoS support for lower-bounded elastic traffic in an anonymous and noncooperative ad hoc WLAN setting, with a surrogate admission scheme relying on the Nash equilibrium property of a small number of concurrent transfers, and fairness ensured by the symmetric nature of a proposed MAC-layer contention. We study the efficiency of QoS support at a symmetric Markov perfect Nash equilibrium of a QoS-driven contention game and find it dependent on the relationship between a station's power budget and the deadline for starting a transfer of QoS-sensitive traffic.