Game Theoretic Packet Scheduling in a Non-cooperative Wireless Environment

Abstract

In many practical scenarios, wireless devices are autonomous and thus, may exhibit non-cooperative behaviors due to self-interests. For instance, a wireless cellular device may be programmed to report bogus channel information to gain resource allocation advantages. In this paper, we first analyze the impact of these rationally selfish behaviors on the performance of packet scheduling algorithms in time-slotted wireless networks. We further propose a novel game theoretic approach, where a user punishes the selfish user with a probability p, to enforce cooperation among selfish users. Through simulations, we can see the wireless users are scheduled more efficiently and fairly in this non-cooperative environment with our proposed approach.