A novel game-theoretic MAC protocol for wireless networks

A novel distributed game-theory-based MAC protocol (GT-MAC) is proposed for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks to share channel resource efficiently. In the protocol, each sender computes a utility function of each link to maximize the achievable throughput. It flexibly employs request-to-send, clear-to-send and decide-to-send (RTS/CTS/DTS) dialogue and then the acknowledgment (ACK) packet for the data packet transmission is replied to the sender, which completely eliminates the influence of exposed terminal problem. Any communication pairs within locality can take full advantage of multiple traffic channels without collisions and the spatial reuse. Transmissions can proceed concurrently by computing the Nash equilibrium (NE) powers for all contending transmitter to take full advantage of channel resources. Finally, performance comparison of the proposed protocol with the traditional single-channel MAC protocol (GMAC) is also provided, and simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the other protocol on network throughput and total channel utilization.