Power control with partial observation in wireless ad hoc networks

TL;DR

This paper extends the forwarder's dilemma in wireless ad hoc networks by analyzing power control strategies under partial channel information, revealing that global CSI offers limited performance gains over local CSI.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework to characterize the long-term utility region with partial CSI and derives power control policies for ad hoc networks.

Findings

Global CSI provides marginal performance improvements over local CSI.

Theoretical characterization of the utility region guides power control policy design.

Numerical results offer new insights into the impact of channel information on network performance.

Abstract

In this paper, the well-known forwarder's dilemma is generalized by accounting for the presence of link quality fluctuations; the forwarder's dilemma is a four-node interaction model with two source nodes and two destination nodes. It is known to be very useful to study ad hoc networks. To characterize the long-term utility region when the source nodes have to control their power with partial channel state information (CSI), we resort to a recent result in Shannon theory. It is shown how to exploit this theoretical result to find the long-term utility region and determine good power control policies. This region is of prime importance since it provides the best performance possible for a given knowledge at the nodes. Numerical results provide several new insights into the repeated forwarder's dilemma power control problem; for instance, the knowledge of global CSI only brings a marginal performance improvement with respect to the local CSI case.