A Game Theoretic Approach to Increase Performance in Multihop Wireless Mesh Networks

Multihop wireless mesh networks have potential to meet the growing demand for flexible, self-organizing, large-scale wireless communication systems. However, these networks remain plagued by relatively poor performance compared to traditional infrastructure based networks. With variable number of nodes and diverse network densities, multihop wireless mesh networks can have low overall network capacity, poor internode fairness and high power consumption. Therefore, we present the decentralized Traffic Aware Iterative Water filling (TAIW) power allocation algorithm. TAIW applies techniques from non-cooperative game theory applied to cognitive radio devices to develop a solution that balances network capacity, node fairness and power consumption. Through extensive simulations we show the TAIW can increase inter-node fairness by 300% and reduce power consumption by 80% over current decentralized power allocation algorithms while maintaining near optimal network capacity.