Homogeneous Interference Game in Wireless Networks

In many modern wireless scenarios, various stations contend for transmission in a an interference-bound environment. The main concern is the ability of the receiving stations to distinguish between the signal of the message and the noise created by other signals in the same proximity. We concentrate on a wireless environment where fixed stations need to communicate with clients in their vicinity, over a common communication channel, and focus on a distributed setting where there is no central entity managing the various transmissions. In such systems, unlike other multiple access environments, several transmissions may succeed simultaneously, depending on spatial interferences between the different stations. We use a game theoretic view to model the problem, where the stations are selfish agents which aim at maximizing their success probability. We show that when interferences are homogeneous, the system’s performance necessarily suffers an exponential degradation of performance in an equilibrium, due to the selfishness of the stations. However, when using a proper penalization scheme for aggressive stations, we can ensure the system’s performance value is at least 1/e from the optimal value, while still being at equilibrium.