Selfish Users and Fair Sharing of Bandwidth in Distributed Medium Access

Abstract

Fair sharing of bandwidth in distributed systems is considered. The inherently contention-based medium access in distributed systems is modelled as a non-cooperative game: “Access Game”. It is shown that the Nash Equilibrium (NE) for incomplete information games is usually inefficient compared to the NE of complete information games. Consequently, simple mechanisms to approximate an incomplete information scenario as a complete information scenario are proposed. For complete information games, it is shown that the NE usually does not result in fairness. Therefore, we compute the Constrained Nash Equilibrium (CNE) of the “Access Game” with the fairness criteria as the constraints. It is shown that the CNE is unique.