Distributed Channel Access in Flying Ad Hoc Network: A Potential Game Perspective

Large-scale Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET) is subject to serious interference. There is internal mutual interference and external malicious interference to it. Some existing channel access methods require exchanging information between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), while others consider only one type of interference. In this paper, we study the problem of distributed channel access in the FANET with limited channel resources, where internal co-channel interference and external malicious interference are considered. A non-cooperative game is designed to characterize the interaction between UAVs. We prove that the proposed game is an exact potential game, which guarantees at least one pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE). We propose a distributed channel access algorithm based on the stochastic learning automata. By independent strategy updates, UAV s can quickly achieve global convergence under different interference scenarios. The simulation results show that the utilities are close to the best NE, demonstrating that the proposed algorithm can effectively avoid interference and fully use the limited channel resources.