Game Theoretic Analysis of Age of Information for Slotted ALOHA Access With Capture

A recent line of analysis discusses the age of information as a better performance metric than throughput or delay to evaluate the performance of medium access techniques, especially when applied to remote sensing applications and more in general the Internet of Things. Fully analytical investigations based on game theory have shown how selfish players can behave efficiently in random access systems if they are driven by AoI-based objectives. In this paper, we expand this kind of reasoning to the case of a slotted ALOHA system with capture effect. We present a fully analytical derivation of some notable cases, based on the existing literature, and we highlight the impact of some parameters, specifically the cost coefficient and the capture threshold, towards achieving an efficient allocation that represents an equilibrium point for the network management. It is shown that, when the capture effect is relatively strong, which is easier when the number of terminals is limited, the Nash equilibrium of the system achieves near-optimal performance.