Intervention in Power Control Games With Selfish Users

TL;DR

This paper proposes intervention-based incentive schemes to regulate selfish users' power levels in wireless ad hoc networks, ensuring efficient power control and reducing interference.

Contribution

It introduces a novel intervention scheme framework with dynamic adjustment processes for power control in networks with selfish users, including analysis of perfect and imperfect monitoring.

Findings

Intervention schemes can achieve any positive power profile with perfect monitoring.

Imperfect monitoring leads to performance loss.

Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of intervention rules.

Abstract

We study the power control problem in wireless ad hoc networks with selfish users. Without incentive schemes, selfish users tend to transmit at their maximum power levels, causing significant interference to each other. In this paper, we study a class of incentive schemes based on intervention to induce selfish users to transmit at desired power levels. An intervention scheme can be implemented by introducing an intervention device that can monitor the power levels of users and then transmit power to cause interference to users. We mainly consider first-order intervention rules based on individual transmit powers. We derive conditions on design parameters and the intervention capability to achieve a desired outcome as a (unique) Nash equilibrium and propose a dynamic adjustment process that the designer can use to guide users and the intervention device to the desired outcome. The effect of using intervention rules based on aggregate receive power is also analyzed. Our results show that with perfect monitoring intervention schemes can be designed to achieve any positive power profile while using interference from the intervention device only as a threat. We also analyze the case of imperfect monitoring and show that a performance loss can occur. Lastly, simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance improvement from using intervention rules and compare the performances of different intervention rules.