Incentive-compatible adaptive-width channel allocation for non-cooperative wireless networks

Abstract

Owing to the limitation of radio spectrum resource and fast deployment of wireless devices, careful channel allocation is of great importance for mitigating the performance degradation caused by interference among different users in wireless networks. Most of existing work focused on fixed-width channel allocation. However, latest researches have demonstrated that it is possible to combine contiguous channels for better utilising the available channels. In this paper, we study the problem of adaptive-width channel allocation in multi-hop, non-cooperative wireless networks from a game-theoretic point of view. We first present a strategic game model and demonstrate the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE). Since a NE is not an ideal solution, we then propose adaptive-width channel allocation in multi-hop, non-cooperative wireless networks (AMPLE), which is a novel incentive approach to guarantee the system performance. Numerical results verify that AMPLE does prevent nodes' misbehaviour, and achieves much higher average system throughputs than anarchical NEs.