Design and implementation of a MAC scheme for wireless ad-hoc networks based on a cooperative game framework

Due to their dynamic topologies, providing quality of service (QoS) in wireless/mobile ad-hoc networks introduces major new challenges to the research community. Today, the only commercially available ad-hoc network products are those based on the widely deployed IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). However DCF is a random access scheme, which not only cannot provide any guarantees, is also well known to suffer from a problem of fairness. In this paper, the bandwidth allocation problem in the medium access control (MAC) layer of ad-hoc networks is modelled as a constrained maximization problem. Based on duality, the problem is further modelled as a cooperative game and an algorithm to solve this problem is provided, and the discussion is centered on the design and implementation issues of the algorithm.