An efficient pricing mechanism of random access in wireless network with self-interested mobile users

Abstract

In the decentralized networks, an important requirement arises in the design of Medium Access Control protocols is the robustness to self-interested behavior of the users. Indeed it's well known that the Medium Access Control protocols are designed based on the assumption that all mobile users act selfishly and follow a personal objective, such behavior may decrease the performance of the majority of users, hence causing fairness issue and decreasing the global energy consumption significantly. In this paper we propose a reward mechanism in a non-cooperative game framework. We assume that the base station promises the user a reward which can be a number of amounts of credit that the users use to transmit their own packets. The reward is given only to a user that transmits its packet successfully. First, we analyze the implementation of our mechanism on the equilibrium and show that as the arrival rate increases, the behavior of users become more and more aggressive resulting in a global deterioration of the expected reward the base station pays. Second and in order to achieve an efficient outcome despite the selfish behavior of users, we propose an incentive mechanism when each failure transmission of a packet incurs a certain number of costs. The cost could in fact be expressed in terms of the energy consumption when attempting to access the wireless channel. Under the proposed scheme aggressive behavior is discouraged since each retransmission translates into the depletion of the energy stored in the battery. Via the price of anarchy we show that the global performance of the system is improved considerably compared to the original game in particular at high loads.