A Game-Theoretic Approach to Prioritized Transmission in Wireless CSMA/CA Networks

Support of traffic with QoS requirements in wireless scenarios is a challenging topic and methodologies for supporting different traffic priorities have recently emerged. Unfortunately in wireless scenarios, it is well known that contention problems are met. The latter can be modeled as a game. Accordingly, in this paper we present a game-theoretic model of prioritized data transmission in CSMA/CA networks where nodes are considered as potential cheaters which should be punished through a jamming mechanism when misbehaving and trying to monopolize wireless resources. Then, we also describe the distributed algorithm to be performed by network nodes to implement the model and assess the validity of both the model and the algorithm through simulations. Index Terms: Wireless networks, QoS, game-theory, algorithms, simulation.