A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Code Synchronization for CDMA Wireless Systems

This paper introduces a game-theoretic formulation for the problem of resource allocation in an infrastructure CDMA wireless communication network, focusing on the issue of initial 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 transmitter-receiver pair seeks to maximize the ratio of the probability of code alignment detection to the transmitted energy per acquisition, under a constraint on the maximum probability of spurious code locks - this is achieved by properly setting the receiver threshold and the transmit power. Our framework also considers the coexistence between different types of synchronizers and different QoS requirements. The generalized Nash solution of the game is investigated and closed-form expressions are derived and compared with simulation results for an iterative decentralized algorithm.