Universal cheat-proof pricing for multiple access channels without SIC under QoS requirements

This paper studies universal cheat-proof pricing by a repeated game for the general multiple access channel (MAC) without successive interference cancelation (SIC). We model the system by three entities: regulator, system optimizer and users. The regulator is designed to ensure the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) based quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of all users and prevent cheating. The feasible utility region, power allocation, corresponding weights, the universal pricing which is linear in pricing parameters and logarithmic in power, and the resulting cost terms are provided. The user misbehavior to maximize their own user-utility is analyzed. A repeated game is formulated with worst case strategy for all the honest users and trigger strategy with trigger pricing for the malicious user once cheating is detected. Analysis and simulation results show that it is possible for the regulator to compute a trigger pricing such that misbehavior is prevented in the repeated game.