Exploiting Regional Differences: A Spatially Adaptive Random Access

In this paper, we discuss the potential for improvement of the simple random access scheme by utilizing local information such as the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR). We propose a spatially adaptive random access (SARA) scheme in which the transmitters in the network utilize different transmit probabilities depending on the local situation. In our proposed scheme, the transmit probability is adaptively updated by the ratio of the received SINR and the target SINR. We investigate the performance of the spatially adaptive random access scheme. For the comparison, we derive an optimal transmit probability of ALOHA random access scheme in which all transmitters use the same transmit probability. We illustrate the performance of the spatially adaptive random access scheme through simulations. We show that the performance of the proposed scheme surpasses that of the optimal ALOHA random access scheme and is comparable with the CSMA/CA scheme.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Random Access Game and Medium Access Control Design

Motivated partially by a control-theoretic viewpoint, we propose a game-theoretic model, called random access game, for contention control. We characterize Nash equilibria of random access games, study their dynamics, and propose distributed algorithms (strategy evolutions) to achieve Nash equilibria. This provides a general analytical framework that is capable of modeling a large class of system-wide quality-of-service (QoS) models via the specification of per-node utility functions, in which system-wide fairness or service differentiation can be achieved in a distributed manner as long as each node executes a contention resolution algorithm that is designed to achieve the Nash equilibrium. We thus propose a novel medium access method derived from carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) according to distributed strategy update mechanism achieving the Nash equilibrium of random access game. We present a concrete medium access method that adapts to a continuous contention measure called conditional collision probability, stabilizes the network into a steady state that achieves optimal throughput with targeted fairness (or service differentiation), and can decouple contention control from handling failed transmissions. In addition to guiding medium access control design, the random access game model also provides an analytical framework to understand equilibrium and dynamic properties of different medium access protocols