Universal Non-Linear Cheat-Proof Pricing Framework for Wireless Multiple Access Channels

The success of future wireless networks depends on the correct and robust operation with selfish or even malicious nodes. Game theory provides methods to design such wireless systems. In this paper, we study a general multiple access system (with linear and nonlinear receiver) with three types of agents: the regulator, the system optimizer and the mobile users. The users formulate the signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) based quality-of-service (QoS) requirements and pay a corresponding virtual fee to the regulator depending on their transmit power. The regulator ensures the QoS requirements of all users by clever non-linear pricing and prevents cheating. The simple system optimizer solves the system utility maximization problem to allocate the power. The feasible utility region, power allocation, weights, the universal pricing, which is linear in the pricing parameters and logarithmic in power, and the resulting cost terms are derived in closed form. The user misbehavior is analyzed. Finally a repeated game is formulated with the worst case strategy for all the honest users and trigger strategy for the cheater. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed framework is strategy-proof.