Efficient Medium Access Control Design – A Game Theoretical Approach

In this paper, we address the question that how to design efficient MAC protocols in selfish and noncooperative networks, which is crucial in nowadays open environments. We model the medium access control problem as a non-cooperative game in which the MAC protocol can be regarded as distributed strategy update scheme approaching the equilibrium point. Under such game theoretical framework, three MAC protocols, the aggressive, conservative and cheat-proof MAC protocol, are then proposed with tunable parameters allowing them to converge to desired social optimal point. The first two MAC protocols require network participants to follow the rules, while the cheat-proof MAC protocol can survive the selfish environments where nodes are pure self-interested. Based on our game theoretical analysis, we provide a general methodology for designing efficient MAC protocols in non-cooperative and selfish environments. We believe that the proposed methodology not only provides a general way of designing stable and controllable MAC protocols achieving high performance even in selfish environments, but also provides a general framework that can be extended to design efficient protocols in other non-cooperative and selfish environments.