Pareto improvement for radio resource control under incomplete channel information: A game-theoretical approach

In wireless communication systems where users compete for limited bandwidth, radio resource control is essential for throughput enhancement and delay reduction. In this paper, we present a game-theoretical approach to distributed resource control in CDMA systems. Incomplete information about channel conditions is considered. The resource control problem is formulated as a noncooperative game of incomplete information, with which the existence and uniqueness of the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) of the game is investigated. Since the equilibrium is Pareto inefficient, we propose a pricing policy to the resource control game by adding a penalty price to user's transmission cost. With the adoption of the price, user's aggressive behavior is depressed, and Pareto improvement is achieved. Also the Pareto efficient BNE of the game with pricing is studied. Simulation results show that users can obtain higher throughput and lower average packet transmission delay by proper pricing policy. It is also verified that the scheme of pricing policy is robust when information of channel conditions is inaccurate.