Distributed Power Control for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: A Game-Theoretic Approach Based on Best-Response Functions

This paper presents a novel framework for distributed power control for ad-hoc wireless networks. We analyze dynamic adaptive power allocation assuming that transmit power is adjusted with respect to experienced interference based on general best-response functions. For this purpose, we develop a general non-cooperative game-theoretic framework in order to characterize optimal equilibrium states and convergence of distributed power control dynamics to such states. Our work provides a more general insight to game-theoretic power control compared to most of recent works in this field. Moreover, our framework is developed in an abstract way without any technical assumption on particular modulation, coding, QoS measure definition or network architecture. To demonstrate an application of our framework, we show that stable linear best-response power control converges exponentially to a unique Nash equilibrium for any initial condition, which we confirm by numerical simulations.