A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Code Acquisition in CDMA Wireless Systems

This paper proposes a game-theoretic approach to the problem of resource allocation for a CDMA wireless communication network, focusing on code synchronization. To capture the tradeoff between obtaining good synchronization performance and saving as much energy as possible, we propose a noncooperative game in which each pair transmitter-receiver in the network seeks to maximize the ratio of the probability of detection to the transmitted energy per bit by setting its transmit power and its optimum detection threshold, under a constraint on the maximum probability of spurious code locks. This framework also considers the coexistence between different types of synchronizers in the network and different QoS requirements. The Nash solution of the game is investigated and closed-form expressions are derived and compared with simulation results for a decentralized resource control algorithm.