Evolutionary games for multiple accessl control: From Egoism to Altruism

This paper studies multiple access games with a large population of mobiles decomposed into several groups. Mobiles interfere with each others through many local interactions. We assume that each mobile (or player) cooperates with his group by taking into account the performance of his group. The degree of cooperation not only covers the fully non-cooperative behavior and the fully cooperative behavior, but also the fully altruistic behavior. To do so, we make use of the evolutionary game theory which we extend to cover this kind of behavior. We define and characterize the equilibrium (called Evolutionary Stable Strategy) for these games and establish the optimal level of cooperation that maximizes the probability of successful transmission. We also study the game dynamics both in its classical form and in the presence of delay. Interestingly, we show that, in order to maximize the system performance, the mobiles should be less cooperative.