Controlled Matching Game for Resource Allocation and User Association in WLANs

In multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLANs, the traditional user association based on the strongest received signal and the well known anomaly of the MAC protocol can lead to overloaded Access Points (APs), and poor or heterogeneous performance. Our goal is to propose an alternative game-theoretic approach for association. We model the joint resource allocation and user association as a matching game with complementarities and peer effects consisting of selfish players solely interested in their individual throughputs. Using recent game-theoretic results we first show that various resource sharing protocols actually fall in the scope of the set of stability-inducing resource allocation schemes. The game makes an extensive use of the Nash bargaining and some of its related properties that allow to control the incentives of the players. We show that the proposed mechanism can greatly improve the efficiency of 802.11 with heterogeneous nodes and reduce the negative impact of peer effects such as its MAC anomaly. The mechanism can be implemented as a virtual connectivity management layer to achieve efficient APs-user associations without modification of the MAC layer

Learning a Correlated Equilibrium with Perturbed Regret Minimization

International audienceIn this paper, we consider the problem of learning a correlated equilibrium of a finite non-cooperative game and show a new adaptive heuristic, called Correlated Perturbed Regret Minimization (CPRM) for this purpose. CPRM combines regret minimization to approach the set of correlated equilibria and a simple device suggesting actions to the players to further stabilize the dynamic. Numerical experiments support the hypothesis of the pointwise convergence of the empirical distribution over action profiles to an approximate correlated equilibrium with all players following the devices' suggestions. Additional simulation results suggest that CPRM is adaptive to changes in the game such as departures or arrivals of players

About Joint Stable User Association and Resource Allocation in Multi-Rate IEEE 802.11 WLANs

International audienceThis paper aims at proposing an alternative approach for both the modeling of the IEEE 802.11 resource allocation scheme and the design of mechanisms to reduce the impact of the anomaly of the protocol. We use game theory to model the IEEE 802.11 resource allocation and mobiles users to APs association as a coalition matching game. We propose a new mechanism that gives mobile users and APs the incentive to associate with each others in a way that both absorbs the load and reduce the negative impact of the anomaly in IEEE 802.11

Controlled Matching Game for User Association and Resource Allocation in Multi-Rate WLANs

International audience—The deployment of IEEE 802.11 based WLANs in populated areas is such that many mobile terminals are covered by several Access Points (APs). These mobiles have the possibility to associate to the AP with the strongest signal (best-RSSI association scheme).This can lead to poor performances and overloaded APs. Moreover, the well known anomaly in the protocol at the MAC layer may also lead to very unpredictable performances and affect the system throughput due to the presence of heterogeneous data rate nodes and the shared nature of the 802.11 medium. The goal of this paper is to propose an alternative approach for the association. We model the joint resource allocation and mobile user association as a matching game with complementarities, peer effects and selfish players 1. We focus on the throughput fairness allocation induced by the saturated regime with equal packet sizes. We propose a novel three-stages mechanism for the modeling and control of load balancing, resource allocation and user association. We show that the proposed mechanism can greatly improve the efficiency of 802.11 with heterogeneous nodes and reduce the negative impact of peer effects such as the anomaly in IEEE 802.11

Impact of Mobility on QoS in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

International audienceThis paper develops a model evaluating the impactof mobility in heterogeneous wireless networks by the way ofanalytical expressions of the spatio-temporal evolution of QoS indicators. Such formulas are obtained by introducing a multi-user averaged mobility pattern named density of users. Among the set of densities, we use a Gaussian form of this quantity, which results from a modeling method based on the maximum entropy principle. Numerical results show the temporal variations of the QoS indicators and highlight the combined effects of network heterogeneity due to the presence of macro and small cells, and traffic variations due to mobility.</p

Core stable algorithms for coalition games with complementarities and peer effects

International audienceIn this paper, we show two new algorithms for finding stable structures in ordinal coalition potential games. The first one is anytime and enumerative. It performs on a graph. The second one is a modified Deferred Acceptance Algorithm (DAA) using counter-proposals. It finds a many-to-one matching. We illustrate with the example of video caching from a content creator’s servers to a service provider’s servers

Controlled Matching Games for Resource Allocation and User Association in Multi-Rate WiFi Networks

National audienc

Controlled Matching Games for Resource Allocation and User Association in Wireless Networks

National audienc