Non-cooperative Channel Allocation in Ad-Hoc Networks Using Game Theory

Channel allocation has become a significant challenge in multi-channel Ad-Hoc networks due to the fast growing of wireless applications and the limitation of spectrum resource. In this paper, we assume that the demand of each user is different and alterable, which has been known by all the others. We study the problem of demand-aware channel allocation (DaChA) from a non-cooperative strategic game theoretic view. We show that the game would converge to a Nash Equilibrium (NE), but the NE may be sub-optimal. To avoid this possible situation, we propose a novel mechanism which assigns a prior channel to each communication link. If deviating from the prior channel, we design a charging scheme which would induce players to converge to a unique NE. We analyze the Pareto-Optimality (PO) of the game and work out that the unique NE must be Pareto optimal. The simulation results demonstrate that the mechanism is efficient.