WLAN throughput management: A game theoretic TXOP scheduling approach

This paper investigates the dynamic selection of transmission opportunity (TXOP) which was originally proposed in IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA). A game theoretic optimisation framework is proposed to schedule the optimal TXOP value for every station according to the current channel capacity and transmission requirements of the stations, in order to improve the efficiency of TXOP scheduling and channel resource utilisation. The advantages of the proposed decentralised mechanism include the increased flexibility in TXOP allocation and the reduced complexity. The proposed mechanism has potential applications in the future IEEE 802.11ax standard. Theoretical study shows the existence of Nash equilibrium where the stations achieve an optimal TXOP scheduling. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the proposed framework.