The price of Non-cooperation in reservation-based bandwidth sharing protocols

Abstract

In reservation-based bandwidth sharing  protocols,  the  base  station  relies  on  the  stations’requests to allocate time slots to them. Like most other protocols, reservation-based protocols were designed with the assumption that all stationsrespect the rules of the protocols. However, as mobile devices are becoming more intelligent andprogrammable, they can selfishly optimize their operations to obtain a larger share of commonbandwidth. Here, we study reservation-based bandwidth sharing protocols considering the existence of selfish stations through game-theoretic perspectives. We  show  that  this  game admits  a  Nash equilibrium. Then, we prove the inefficiency of the Nash equilibrium. Game-theoretical analysis shows that local optimization in the bandwidth  sharing  problem with conflicted interests does not lead  to any global optimization.