Impact of Selfish Rate Adaptation on the Performance in IEEE 802.11-Based Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

Multiple physical layer rates are supported in IEEE 802.11-based wireless networks, where links can adopt joint transmission power control and rate adaptation to achieve energy efficiency. This paper studies the selfish rate adaptation behavior under throughput requirement. A round-based non-cooperative game is proposed assuming there is only one link which can adjust its transmission strategy in each unit time. It is shown that there is an optimal transmission strategy for a link, and a greedy algorithm is presented to select a near-optimal transmission strategy. It is observed that scheduling order affects the feasibility and the total power consumption. To alleviate the influence of scheduling order, pricing function is introduced, which motivates selfish links to share the channel fairly and efficiently. Simulation results show the proposed approach leads to not only more feasible solutions, but also power efficiency.