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On spectrum sharing games

Published: 25 July 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Each access point (AP) in a WiFi network must be assigned a channel for it to service users. There are only finitely many possible channels that can be assigned. Moreover, neighboring access points must use different channels so as to avoid interference. Currently these channels are assigned by administrators who carefully consider channel conflicts and network loads. Channel conflicts among APs operated by different entities are currently resolved in an ad hoc manner or not resolved at all. We view the channel assignment problem as a game, where the players are the service providers and APs are acquired sequentially. We consider the price of anarchy of this game, which is the ratio between the total coverage of the APs in the worst Nash equilibrium of the game and what the total coverage of the APs would be if the channel assignment were done by a central authority. We provide bounds on the price of anarchy depending on assumptions on the underlying network and the type of bargaining allowed between service providers. The key tool in the analysis is the identification of the Nash equilibria with the solutions to a maximal coloring problem in an appropriate graph. We relate the price of anarchy of these games to the approximation factor of local optimization algorithms for the maximum k-colorable subgraph problem. We also study the speed of convergence in these games.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    PODC '04: Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
    July 2004
    422 pages
    ISBN:1581138024
    DOI:10.1145/1011767
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 25 July 2004

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    Author Tags

    1. Nash equilibrium
    2. approximation algorithm
    3. game theory
    4. graph coloring
    5. price of anarchy
    6. unit disk graph

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    PODC04
    PODC04: Principles of Distributed Computing 2004
    July 25 - 28, 2004
    Newfoundland, St. John's, Canada

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    • (2019)On Designing Distributed Auction Mechanisms for Wireless Spectrum AllocationIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2018.286986318:9(2129-2146)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
    • (2018)Crowsourcing: A novel approach to organizing WiFi community networks2018 16th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt)10.23919/WIOPT.2018.8362815(1-8)Online publication date: May-2018
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    • (2016)Decentralized Opportunistic Spectrum Resources Access Model and Algorithm toward Cooperative Ad-Hoc NetworksPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.014552611:1(e0145526)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2016
    • (2016)A Strategy-Proof Auction Mechanism for Adaptive-Width Channel Allocation in Wireless NetworksIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2016.260593934:10(2678-2689)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
    • (2016)A game theoretic approach for an hybrid overlay-underlay spectrum access mode2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC)10.1109/ICC.2016.7511026(1-6)Online publication date: May-2016
    • (2016)Computer Science and Game TheoryThe New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5_2133-1(1-14)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2016
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