Distributed Contention Window Control for Selfish Users in IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

In this paper, we study non-cooperative user behavior in random-access wireless networks in which users have freedom to choose their back-off contention window size according to network´s congestion status. We formulate a non- cooperative game and show the existence and uniqueness of its equilibrium point. We also propose an iterative method leading to the equilibrium point of the game. A discussion of alternative game formulations in the same problem context is also given.