ALOHA Game Research Articles

Aloha Games with Spatial Reuse

Aloha games study the transmission probabilities of a group of non-cooperative users which share a channel to transmit via the slotted Aloha protocol. This paper extends the Aloha games to spatial reuse scenarios, and studies the system equilibrium and performance. Specifically, fixed point theory and order theory are used to prove the existence of a least fixed point as the unique Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game and the optimal choice of all players. The Krasovskii's method is used to construct a Lyapunov function and obtain the conditions to examine the stability of the NE. Simulations show that the theories derived are applicable to large-scale distributed systems of complicated network topologies. An empirical relationship between the network connectivity and the achievable total throughput is finally obtained through simulations.

ALOHA networks: a game-theoretic approach

In this paper we consider a wireless network consisting of various nodes, where transmissions are regulated by the slotted ALOHA protocol. Nodes using the protocol behave autonomously, and decide at random whether to transmit in a particular time slot. Simultaneous transmissions by multiple nodes cause collisions, rendering the transmissions useless. Nodes can avoid collisions by cooperating, for example by exchanging control messages to coordinate their transmissions. We measure the network performance by the long-term average fraction of time slots in which a successful transmission takes place, and we are interested in how to allocate the performance gains obtained from cooperation among the nodes. To this end we define and analyze a cooperative ALOHA game. We show that this type of game is convex and we consider three solution concepts: the core, the Shapley value, and the compromise value. Furthermore, we develop a set of weighted gain splitting (WGS) allocation rules, and show that this set coincides with the core of the game. These WGS allocation rules can be used to provide an alternative characterization of the Shapley value. Finally, we analyze the sensitivity of the cooperative solution concepts with respect to changes in the wireless network. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Stability of Slotted Aloha with Selfish Users under Delay Constraint

Most game-theoretic works of Aloha have emphasized investigating Nash equilibria according to the system state represented by the number of network users and their decisions. In contrast, we focus on the possible change of nodes’ utility state represented by delay constraint and decreasing utility over time. These foregone changes of nodes’ state are more likely to instigate selfish behaviors in networking environments. For such environment, in this paper, we propose a repeated Bayesian slotted Aloha game model to analyze the selfish behavior of impatient users. We prove the existence of Nash equilibrium mathematically and empirically. The proposed model enables any type of transmission probability sequence to achieve Nash equilibrium without degrading its optimal throughput. Those Nash equilibria can be used as a solution concept to thwart the selfish behaviors of nodes and ensure the system stability.