Joint route selection and resource allocation in multihop wireless networks based on a game theoretic approach

In this work we aim to design simple, distributed self-configuring solutions for the problem of route selection and channel and power allocation in multihop autonomous wireless systems using a game theoretic perspective. We propose and compare three games with different levels of complexity: a potential flow game where players need complete network knowledge, a local flow game requiring full information of the flow and a low complexity cooperative link game which works with partial information of the flow. All these games have been designed to always assure the convergence to a stable point in order to be implemented as distributed algorithms. To evaluate their quality, we also obtain the best achievable performance in the system using mathematical optimization. The system is modeled with the physical interference model and two different definitions of the network utility are considered: the number of active flows and the aggregated capacity in bps. Results show that the proposed games approach the centralized solution, and specially, that the simpler cooperative link game provides a performance close to that of the flow games.