An Energy-efficient Non-cooperative Game Approach for Channel-aware Distributed Medium Access Control

In this paper, an energy-efficient non-cooperative game approach is proposed for channel-aware distributed medium access control (EN-CDMAC) in slotted-Aloha systems, where users act selfishly to improve their own utilities. To resolve the network contention in a distributed manner, the capture model is employed and a pricing-based non-cooperative game scheme is designed to enable selfish users effectively achieve multi-user diversity by adjusting their equilibrium thresholds while guaranteeing fairness by the pricing mechanism. Then the existence of Nash equilibrium is proved, and the necessary and sufficient condition is derived to ensure its uniqueness. Furthermore, the equilibrium stability is investigated with stochastic process theory. Simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the network throughput and delay performance without sacrificing energy efficiency compared to the conventional slotted-Aloha scheme. In particular, the proposed approach is more applicable for high-load systems.