On Wireless Game-Theoretic Power Control with Successive Interference Cancellation

A power control framework for selfish users in a wireless DS-CDMA uplink with imperfect successive interference cancellation is offered. After presenting a feasibility constraint and a centralized power control solution, the system is analyzed and simulated as a noncooperative game for both continuous and discrete power control cases. Assuming a fixed a priori cancellation order, a unique Nash equilibrium corresponding to a centralized solution is shown to exist in the continuous case. It is shown that the realizable gains of the SIC receiver in a game-theoretic context, although strongly dependent on spreading gain and residual cancellation error, nevertheless are significant when compared to traditional matched filter detection, as expected. If the action space is discrete and sufficiently coarse, empirical results indicate a high probability of Nash equilibrium existence.