Stability and Distributed Power Control in MANETs with Outages and Retransmissions

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact of hop-by-hop packet loss and retransmissions in MANETs, proposing a distributed power control algorithm based on game theory that enhances network stability and capacity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel power control method using supermodular game theory for MANETs with outages, ensuring near-optimal stability and capacity with minimal information exchange.

Findings

The success probability function significantly influences network capacity.

The proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal power allocation.

Distributed control reduces information exchange among nodes.

Abstract

In the current work the effects of hop-by-hop packet loss and retransmissions via ARQ protocols are investigated within a Mobile Ad-hoc NET-work (MANET). Errors occur due to outages and a success probability function is related to each link, which can be controlled by power and rate allocation. We first derive the expression for the network's capacity region, where the success function plays a critical role. Properties of the latter as well as the related maximum goodput function are presented and proved. A Network Utility Maximization problem (NUM) with stability constraints is further formulated which decomposes into (a) the input rate control problem and (b) the scheduling problem. Under certain assumptions problem (b) is relaxed to a weighted sum maximization problem with number of summants equal to the number of nodes. This further allows the formulation of a non-cooperative game where each node decides independently over its transmitting power through a chosen link. Use of supermodular game theory suggests a price based algorithm that converges to a power allocation satisfying the necessary optimality conditions of (b). Implementation issues are considered so that minimum information exchange between interfering nodes is required. Simulations illustrate that the suggested algorithm brings near optimal results.