Contention Control: A Game-Theoretic Approach

The authors present a game-theoretic approach to contention control. They define a game-theoretic model, called random access game, to capture the contention/interaction among wireless nodes in wireless networks with contention-based medium access. They characterize Nash equilibria of random access games, study their dynamics and propose distributed algorithms (strategy evolutions) to achieve the Nash equilibria. This provides a general analytical framework that is capable of modelling a large class of system-wide quality of service models via the specification of per-node utility functions, in which system-wide fairness or service differentiation can be achieved in a distributed manner as long as each node executes a contention resolution algorithm that is designed to achieve the Nash equilibrium.