Pricing and Intervention in Slotted-Aloha: Technical Report

TL;DR

This paper analyzes incentive schemes like pricing and intervention in slotted-Aloha networks to improve efficiency, providing criteria for scheme selection and demonstrating conditions under which each scheme performs best.

Contribution

It introduces criteria for choosing between pricing and intervention schemes in slotted-Aloha and designs optimal policies based on system parameters.

Findings

Intervention achieves maximum efficiency under perfect monitoring.

Performance depends on information availability in imperfect monitoring.

Threshold effects determine when pricing or intervention is more effective.

Abstract

In many wireless communication networks a common channel is shared by multiple users who must compete to gain access to it. The operation of the network by self-interested and strategic users usually leads to the overuse of the channel resources and to substantial inefficiencies. Hence, incentive schemes are needed to overcome the inefficiencies of non-cooperative equilibrium. In this work we consider a slotted-Aloha like random access protocol and two incentive schemes: pricing and intervention. We provide some criteria for the designer of the protocol to choose one scheme between them and to design the best policy for the selected scheme, depending on the system parameters. Our results show that intervention can achieve the maximum efficiency in the perfect monitoring scenario. In the imperfect monitoring scenario, instead, the performance of the system depends on the information held by the different entities and, in some cases, there exists a threshold for the number of users such that, for a number of users lower than the threshold, intervention outperforms pricing, whereas, for a number of users higher than the threshold pricing outperforms intervention.