Efficient Medium Access Control Design for Autonomous Wireless Networks - A Game Theoretic Approach

In this paper, we address the crucial issue of how to design efficient MAC protocols in autonomous wireless networks with selfish users. We model the wireless medium access control problem as a non-cooperative game in which the MAC protocol can be regarded as distributed strategy update scheme approaching the equilibrium point. Under such game theoretic framework, three MAC protocols, the aggressive, conservative and cheat-proof MAC protocol, are then proposed with tunable parameters allowing them to converge to the desired social optimal point. The first two MAC protocols require network participants to follow the rules, while the cheat-proof MAC protocol can survive the selfish environments where nodes are purely self-interested. Based on our game theoretic analysis, we provide a general methodology for designing efficient MAC protocols for autonomous wireless networks. We believe that the proposed methodology not only provides a general way of designing stable and controllable MAC protocols achieving high performance even in selfish environments, but also provides a general framework that can be extended to design efficient protocols in other non-cooperative environments.