A study of HIPERLAN-type noncooperative medium access control setting in a wireless LAN

A single-hop wireless LAN is considered. Stations contend for access to the shared radio channel using an elective-type MAC protocol whose two components are? a common scheduling policy that provides a framework for taking elective actions and defines winning elective actions, and contention strategies that dictate actions in successive protocol cycles. In a noncooperative setting the two components are logically separate: besides cooperative stations that use a standard HIPERLAN-type contention strategy, there are noncooperative stations that use self-optimising strategies at the bandwidth cost of the former, yet in order to conceal their nature and maintain proper synchronisation adhere to the scheduling policy. This paper proposes a self-regulatory solution whereby the scheduling policy and the contention strategy used by c-stations are jointly designed so as to invoke a noncooperative inter-station game with a fair outcome. A family of policies, termed EB/ECD-Monotone(Δ), and contention strategies called Closed Shop and Best Response are proposed and found satisfactory upon evaluation via simulation with a focus on bandwidth distribution under heavy-load.