Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Transmission costs, selfish nodes, and protocol design

  • Published:
Wireless Networks Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We study the influence of transmission costs on the behavior of selfish nodes in wireless local area networks. Intuitively, it seems that transmission costs should have a stabilizing effect as (rational) nodes will defer packet transmissions when congestion develops and the cost for (successfully) transmitting a packet becomes high. In this paper we investigate whether this intuition is true. We use the slotted Aloha to model the communication channel where we capture the interaction among nodes as a non-cooperative game. For this game, we study the existence and properties of a (symmetric) Nash equilibrium. We show that the existence of a transmission cost is not always sufficient to guarantee stability. In particular, a stable equilibrium strategy will not exist if the transmission cost is too small. We then propose and analyze a price-based mechanism to guarantee stability and to optimize system performance in terms of throughput and delay.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. D. Bertsekas and R. Gallager, Data Networks, 2nd edn. (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1992).

  2. R. Gallager, Discrete Stochastic Processes, 1st edn. (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).

  3. A.B. MacKenzie and S.B. Wicker, Selfish users in Aloha: A game-theoretic approach,” in: Proceedings of the 54th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, (October 2001), Vol. 3, pp. 1354–1357.

  4. E. Altman, R. El-Azouzi, and T. Jimenez, Slotted Aloha as a stochastic game with partial information, Computer Networks 45(6) (2004) 701–713.

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  5. E. Altman, D. Barman, R. El Azouzi, and T. Jimenez, A game theoretic approach for delay minimization in slotted Aloha, in: Proceedings of IEEE ICC, Paris (June 2004).

  6. M. Raya, J.P. Hubaux, and I. Aad, DOMINO: A system to detect greedy behavior in IEEE 802.11 hotspots, in: Proceedings of MobiSys 2004, Boston (June 2004).

  7. M. Cagalj, S. Ganeriwal, I. Aad, and J.P. Hubaux, On selfish behavior in CSMA/CA networks, in: Proceedings of IEEE Infocom, Miami, Florida, USA (March 2005).

  8. C. Yuen and P. Marbach, Rate control and slotted Aloha, in: Proceedings of the 41th Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL (2003).

  9. C. Yuen and P. Marbach, Price-based rate control in random access networks, to appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (2005).

  10. P. Marbach, Rate control for random access networks: The finite node case, in: Proceedings of 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Bahamas (December 2004).

  11. A.G. Pakes, Some conditions for ergodicity and recurrence of Markov chains, Operations Research 17 (1969) 1058–1061.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G4, Canada

    Peter Marbach

Authors
  1. Peter Marbach
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Marbach.

Additional information

Peter Marbach was born in Lucerne, Switzerland. He received the Eidg. Dipl. El.-Ing. (1993) from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, the M.S. (1994) in electrical engineering from the Columbia University, NY, U.S.A, and the Ph.D. (1998) in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. He was appointed as assistant professor in 2000, and associate professor in 2005, at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Toronto. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the EPFL, Switzerland, a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Communication Systems Research, University of Cambridge, UK, and a Visiting Scientist at the Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich. Peter Marbach has received the IEEE INFOCOM 2002 Best Paper Award for his paper “Priority Service and Max-Min Fairness”. He is on the editorial board of the IEEE/ACM Transactions of Networking. His research interests are in the fields of communication networks, in particular in wireless networks, peer-to-peer networks, and content-delivery networks.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Marbach, P. Transmission costs, selfish nodes, and protocol design. Wireless Netw 14, 615–631 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-006-0004-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-006-0004-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation