Game Theoretic Design of MAC Protocols: Pricing Versus Intervention

In many wireless communication networks a common channel is shared by multiple users who must compete to gain access to it. The operation of the network by self-interested and strategic users usually leads to the overuse of the channel resources and to substantial inefficiencies. Hence, incentive schemes are needed to overcome the inefficiencies of non-cooperative equilibrium. In this work, we consider a slotted-Aloha-like random access protocol and two incentive schemes: pricing and intervention. We provide some criteria for the designer of the protocol to choose one scheme between them and to design the best policy for the selected scheme, depending on the system parameters. Our results show that intervention can achieve the maximum efficiency in the perfect monitoring scenario. In the imperfect monitoring scenario, instead, the performance of the system depends on the beliefs of the different entities and, in some cases, there exists a threshold for the number of users such that, for a number of users lower than the threshold, intervention outperforms pricing, whereas for a number of users higher than the threshold pricing outperforms intervention.