Introducing Hierarchy in Energy Games

TL;DR

This paper explores how introducing hierarchy in wireless energy games, through Stackelberg leadership and successive interference cancellation, enhances individual and network-wide energy efficiency and stabilizes equilibria.

Contribution

It presents novel hierarchical game formulations for energy-efficient power control, demonstrating improvements over non-hierarchical approaches.

Findings

Hierarchy improves individual energy efficiency.

Hierarchy can ensure the existence of non-saturated equilibria.

Hierarchy balances global network performance and signaling complexity.

Abstract

In this work we introduce hierarchy in wireless networks that can be modeled by a decentralized multiple access channel and for which energy-efficiency is the main performance index. In these networks users are free to choose their power control strategy to selfishly maximize their energy-efficiency. Specifically, we introduce hierarchy in two different ways: 1. Assuming single-user decoding at the receiver, we investigate a Stackelberg formulation of the game where one user is the leader whereas the other users are assumed to be able to react to the leader's decisions; 2. Assuming neither leader nor followers among the users, we introduce hierarchy by assuming successive interference cancellation at the receiver. It is shown that introducing a certain degree of hierarchy in non-cooperative power control games not only improves the individual energy efficiency of all the users but can also be a way of insuring the existence of a non-saturated equilibrium and reaching a desired trade-off between the global network performance at the equilibrium and the requested amount of signaling. In this respect, the way of measuring the global performance of an energy-efficient network is shown to be a critical issue.