Joint Channel Selection and Power Control in Infrastructureless Wireless Networks: A Multiplayer Multiarmed Bandit Framework

This paper deals with the problem of efficient resource allocation in dynamic infrastructureless wireless networks. In a reactive interference-limited scenario, at each transmission trial, every transmitter selects a frequency channel from some common pool, together with a power level. As a result, for all transmitters, not only the fading gain, but the number and the power of interfering transmissions as well, vary over time. Due to the absence of a central controller and time varying network characteristics, it is highly inefficient for transmitters to acquire the global channel and network knowledge. Therefore, given no information, each transmitter selfishly intends to maximize its average reward, which is a function of the channel quality, as well as the joint selection profile of all transmitters. This scenario is modeled as an adversarial multiplayer multiarmed bandit game, where players attempt to minimize their so-called regret, while, at the network side, achieving equilibrium in some sense. Based on this model and to solve the resource allocation problem, in this paper, we develop two joint power level and channel selection strategies. We prove that the gap between the average rewards achieved by our approaches and that based on the best fixed strategy converges to zero asymptotically. Moreover, the empirical joint frequencies of the game converge to the set of correlated equilibria, which is characterized for two relaxed versions of the designed game.