Flow allocation with joint channel and power assignment in multihop cognitive radio networks using game theory

This paper presents a game theoretic solution for end-to-end flow allocation with joint channel and power assignment in multihop cognitive radio networks under the physical interference model. The objective is to find a distributed solution that maximizes the network utility with limited information. We consider two different criteria to define this network utility: the number of flows that can be established in the network and the aggregate capacity in bps of the established flows. We propose three different games to address this problem: a local flow game based on complete information about the links of the flow, a potential flow game which needs overall network information and a cooperative link game only requiring partial information about the links of the flow. We introduce the required modifications in the local flow and the cooperative link game definitions to ensure their convergence. Results show that the proposed games adapt to the considered network utility definitions. In addition, the cooperative link game highly decreases the complexity of the flow allocation problems with a performance similar to that of the local and potential flow games.