A new game for future Wi-Fi spectrum sharing

Abstract

This article offers a vision for moving on from the paradigm of “constrained politeness” that has long governed Wi-Fi access to a shared spectrum – as embodied by the CSMA/CA mechanism and restricted EIRP limits. Instead, it is proposed to embrace a paradigm of a “cooperative game” where quasi-cognitive devices establish by themselves a mutually collaborative spectrum coexistence community, based on a unified set of simple rules, which operates on the basis of balancing individual transmits powers as a function of overall noise environment. It is shown that the proposed new mode of spectrum access, results in a significantly increased overall spectrum use efficiency, defined in terms of aggregate throughput carried in given bandwidth by a populace of devices over unit area. Most importantly, the new spectrum access would be still implicitly suitable for the Wi-Fi ethos of self-management and uncoordinated deployment. The proposed method, supported by both theoretical and practical simulations, represents one of the first practical implementations that prove feasibility and usefulness of Game Theory to the practice of wireless communications.