Computer network bandwidth can be viewed as a limited resource. The users on the network compete for that resource. Their competition can be simulated using game theory models. No centralized regulation of network usage is possible because of the diverse ownership of network resources. Therefore, the problem is of ensuring the fair sharing of network resources. If a centralized system could be developed which would govern the use of the shared resources, each user would get an assigned network usage time or bandwidth, thereby limiting each person's usage of network resources to his or her fair share. As of yet, however, such a system remains an impossibility, making the situation of sharing network resources a competitive game between the users of the network and decreasing everyone's utility. This chapter explores this competitive game.
TopGame Models For Wlan Resource Management
In 2004, Altman et al., proposed a non-cooperative game model for optimal random channel access in s Local Area Network (WLAN) (Altman, Borkar, & Kherani, 2004) (Figure 1). In this game model, the players are the nodes in the network, and the strategy of each player is the probability of a transmission attempt if there is a packet in the queue. The player’s utility is defined as the payoff due to successful packet transmission. To achieve the Nash equilibrium of channel access, a distributed algorithm was proposed considering the constraint on battery power at the mobile node (Niyato, 2007). Another game model for WLANs was proposed to support the QoS requirements (Berlemann, Hiertz, Walke, & Mangold, 2005). This game was designed as a radio resource sharing game among multiple wireless networks. In this game, the players are the different wireless networks, the strategy of each player corresponds to demand for resource allocation, and the payoff is obtained based on throughput, channel access period length, and transmission delay. Nash equilibrium is considered as the solution of the game in a bargaining domain (Niyato, 2007). For channel access in WLAN, another non-cooperative repeated game was formulated for CSMA/CA-based MAC protocol (Tan, & Guttag, 2005). The players of this game are the mobile nodes, and the strategy of each player is the data rate and average payload size. The payoff of each player is the achievable throughput. It was observed that the Nash equilibrium of this game cannot achieve the highest system throughput. However, by guaranteeing fair long-term channel access for each player, the total throughput achieved by all the nodes can be maximized (Niyato, 2007), (Tan, 2005).