Strategic subchannel resource allocation for cooperative OFDMA Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are emerging as a key solution to provide broadband and mobile wireless connectivity in a flexible and cost effective way. In suburban areas, a common deployment model relies on OFDMA communications between mesh routers (MRs), with one MR installed at each user premises. In this paper, we investigate a possible user cooperation path to implement strategic resource allocation in OFDMA WMNs, under the assumption that users want to control their interconnection. In this case, a novel strategic situation appears: how much a MR can demand, how much it can obtain and how this shall depend on the interference with its neighbors. Strategic interference management and resource allocation mechanisms are needed to avoid performance degradation during congestion cases between MRs. In this paper, we model the problem as a bankruptcy game taking into account the interference between MRs. We identify possible solutions from cooperative game theory, namely the Shapley value and the Nucleolus, and show that they outperform two state-of-the-art schemes, namely Centralized-Dynamic Frequency Planning, C-DFP, and Frequency-ALOHA, F-ALOHA. In particular, the Nucleolus solution offers best performance overall in terms of throughput and fairness.