1 research outputs found
Non-cooperative Game For Capacity Offload
With the blasting increase of wireless data traffic, incumbent wireless
service providers (WSPs) face critical challenges in provisioning spectrum
resource. Given the permission of unlicensed access to TV white spaces, WSPs
can alleviate their burden by exploiting the concept of "capacity offload" to
transfer part of their traffic load to unlicensed spectrum. For such use cases,
a central problem is for WSPs to coexist with others, since all of them may
access the unlicensed spectrum without coordination thus interfering each
other. Game theory provides tools for predicting the behavior of WSPs, and we
formulate the coexistence problem under the framework of non-cooperative games
as a capacity offload game (COG). We show that a COG always possesses at least
one pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (NE), and does not have any mixed-strategy
NE. The analysis provides a full characterization of the structure of the NEs
in two-player COGs. When the game is played repeatedly and each WSP
individually updates its strategy based on its best-response function, the
resulting process forms a best-response dynamic. We establish that, for
two-player COGs, alternating-move best-response dynamics always converge to an
NE, while simultaneous-move best-response dynamics does not always converge to
an NE when multiple NEs exist. When there are more than two players in a COG,
if the network configuration satisfies certain conditions so that the resulting
best-response dynamics become linear, both simultaneous-move and
alternating-move best-response dynamics are guaranteed to converge to the
unique NE