Exploiting Mobility Diversity in Sharing Wireless Access: A Game Theoretic Approach

We propose a wireless access scheme which is based on a channel reservation sharing method for a group of mobile users. This proposed scheme exploits the mobility diversity of the mobile users in order to reduce the cost of wireless access. Another aspect of the proposed scheme is contention resolution among mobile users belonging to the same group in order to access the reserved channel while they are at the same location. A game theoretic model is developed for this wireless access scheme through which the rational mobile users can minimize the cost of wireless access while satisfying their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements (e.g., packet loss rate and average packet waiting time). The proposed game model consists of two interrelated formulations: a coalitional game for channel reservation and a stochastic game for channel access. The stable coalitional structure and equilibrium channel access policy are obtained from this game model.