Price-based interference avoidance game in the Gaussian interference channel

Abstract

This paper considers a distributed interference avoidance problem employing frequency assignment in the Gaussian interference channel (IC). We divide the common channel into several sub-channels and each user chooses one sub-channel for transmission in such a way that the total interference in the IC is minimum. This mechanism named interference avoidance in this paper can be modeled as a competitive game model. And a completely autonomous distributed iterative algorithm called distributed interference avoidance algorithm (DIA) is adopted to achieve the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game. Due to the self-optimum, the DIA is a sub-optimal algorithm. Therefore, through introducing an optimal compensation (or price) into the competitive game model, we successfully develop a compensation-based game model to approximate the optimal interference avoidance problem. Moreover, an optimal algorithm called iterative optimal interference avoidance algorithm (IOIA) is proposed to reach the optimality of the interference avoidance scheme. We analyze the implementation complexity of the proposed algorithm which is only O(N), with N standing for the number of users in the IC. We also give the proof on the convergence of the proposed algorithm. The performance upper bound and lower bound are derived for the IOIA algorithm. The simulation results show that the IOIA does reach the optimality under the condition of interference avoidance mechanism.