Stochastic Geometry based Medium Access Games in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper models MANETs as a stochastic geometry game where nodes selfishly optimize their medium access, and demonstrates how pricing can align individual incentives with the social optimum, analyzing the efficiency loss through Price of Anarchy.

Contribution

It introduces a closed-form analysis of Nash equilibria in MANETs using stochastic geometry and proposes a pricing scheme to achieve social optimality at equilibrium.

Findings

Pricing can align selfish node behavior with social optimum.

Price of Anarchy is bounded for delay-based utility games.

Price of Anarchy is infinite at the global optimum for goodput-based utility.

Abstract

This paper studies the performance of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) when the nodes, that form a Poisson point process, selfishly choose their Medium Access Probability (MAP). We consider goodput and delay as the performance metric that each node is interested in optimizing taking into account the transmission energy costs. We introduce a pricing scheme based on the transmission energy requirements and compute the symmetric Nash equilibria of the game in closed form. It is shown that by appropriately pricing the nodes, the selfish behavior of the nodes can be used to achieve the social optimum at equilibrium. The Price of Anarchy is then analyzed for these games. For the game with delay based utility, we bound the price of anarchy and study the effect of the price factor. For the game with goodput based utility, it is shown that price of anarchy is infinite at the price factor that achieves the global optima.