Random Access Game and Medium Access Control Design

Motivated partially by a control-theoretic viewpoint, the authors propose a game-theoretic model, called random access game, for contention control. They characterize Nash equilibria of random access games, study their dynamics and propose distributed algorithms (strategy evolutions) to achieve Nash equilibria. This provides a general analytical framework that is capable of modelling a large class of systemwide quality of service models via the specification of per-node utility functions, in which systemwide 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.