Non-cooperative quality-aware channel and bandwidth allocations in multi-radio multi-channel wireless networks

This paper studies the problem of non-cooperative joint channel and bandwidth allocations in multi-radio multichannel wireless networks. Existing works only studied non-cooperative multi-radio channel allocation and they did not consider two important issues, impact of traffic load to channel´s transmission quality, and difference of bandwidth demands for different node pairs, which may have significant impact on the modeling and designing solutions. To address these two issues, we extend the problem of non-cooperative multi-radio channel allocation to Non-cooperative Joint Channel and Bandwidth Allocation problem (NJCBA). In the NJCBA problem, node pairs need to consider not only allocating radios to channels, but also allocating bandwidth to selected channels to maximize its own benefit. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study the NJCBA problem in multi-radio multi-channel wireless networks. We model the problem as a non-cooperative game, denoted by NJCBA game. Using the best response concept, we prove that there exist pure Nash Equilibriums (NEs) for the NJCBA game, which means that NJCBA can converge to a stable state. We also analyze the efficiency of the NEs for NJCBA game, and prove that these NEs can achieve a constant Price Of Anarchy (POA) in the heavy-load network. Here, POA denotes the ratio between the sum of the payoffs of all players in a globally optimal solution and the sum of the payoffs achieved in a worst-case NE. We design a distributed algorithm, denoted by NE Convergence (NEC) algorithm, to enable node pairs to converge to a pure NE. The NEC algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulations. The results show that NEC algorithms can improve the system throughput by 2 or 3 times compared with a greedy allocation algorithm.