Variable-Width Channel Allocation in Wireless LAN: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

The fixed channelization structure used by IEEE 802.11-based WLANs constrains the total capacity and leads to unfairness. The concept of variable-width channels is recently proposed to overcome these drawbacks. To investigate the problem of the non-overlapping variable-width channel allocation for selfish access points (APs) in a WLAN, we model it as a non- cooperative game, we aim to investigate two fundamental issues on it in this paper: 1) Are there some fair and system-optimal Nash equilibrium (NE) allocations? 2) How to achieve one of these desirable allocations if they exist? At first, the existence of fair and system-optimal Nash equilibria in this game is proved. Then, a simple protocol to achieve one of these desirable NE allocations is proposed. Considering the implementation issues, a punishment-based method and a transfer-based self-enforcing truth-telling method are proposed for single-stage and multistage game scenarios respectively. The numerical results show the effectiveness of our approaches.