Using Incompletely Cooperative Game Theory in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Recently, game theory becomes a useful and powerful tool to research mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Wireless LANs (WLANs) can work under both infrastructure and ad hoc modes, and are the most widely used MANETs. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of incompletely cooperative game theory and use it to improve the performance of WLANs. In this game, firstly, each node estimates the current state of the game (i.e., the number of competing nodes) by detecting the channel. Secondly, each node changes its equilibrium strategy by tuning its local contention parameters based on the estimated game state. Finally, the game is repeated finitely to get the optimal performance. Our simulation results show that the incompletely cooperative game can increase system throughput, and decrease delay, jitter and packet-loss-rate.