A Controlled Matching Game for WLANs

In multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLANs, the traditional user association based on the strongest received signal and the well-known anomaly of the MAC protocol can lead to overloaded access points (APs), and poor or heterogeneous performance. Our goal is to propose an alternative game-theoretic approach for association. We model the joint resource allocation and user association as a matching game with complementarities and peer effects consisting of selfish players solely interested in their individual throughputs. Using recent game-theoretic results, we first show that various resource sharing protocols actually fall in the scope of the set of stability-inducing resource allocation schemes. The game makes an extensive use of the Nash bargaining and some of its related properties that allow controlling the incentives of the players. We show that the proposed mechanism can greatly improve the efficiency of 802.11 with heterogeneous nodes and reduce the negative impact of peer effects such as its MAC anomaly. The mechanism can be implemented as a virtual connectivity management layer to achieve efficient APs-user associations without modification of the MAC layer.