Opportunistic distributed channel access for a dense wireless small‐cell zone

Abstract

Abstract-This paper considers uplink channel access in a zone of closed-access small-cells that is deployed in a macrocell service area. All small-cell user equipments (SUEs) have access to a common orthogonal set of channels, leading to intercell interference. In addition, each channel forms a separate collision domain in each cell, thus can be successfully used only by one SUE of that cell. This paper proposes two noncooperative Bayesian games, G1 and G2, that are played among the SUEs. G1 assumes the availability of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters while G2 assumes the availability of only the distribution of the CSI. Each SUE can choose to transmit over one of the channels or not to transmit. The emphasis of the paper is on the set of symmetric threshold strategies where the Nash equilibrium is fully determined by a single parameter. The existence and uniqueness of pure Bayesian-Nash symmetric equilibrium (BNSE) of G1 in threshold strategies and mixed BNSE of G2 in uniformly distributed threshold strategies are proven. Numerical results corroborate the theoretical findings and benchmark against another decentralized scheme.