Medium access games: The impact of energy constraints

Abstract

We consider random medium access schemes for devices that support sleep modes, i.e. turning off electronic compartments for energy saving. Due to hardware limitations, sleep mode transitions cannot occur at the medium access timescale. Each terminal can choose when to turn on/off and its probability to transmit on an arbitrary slot. Thus, we develop a two level model, consisting of a fast timescale for transmission scheduling and a slower timescale for the sleep mode transitions. We take a game theoretic approach to model the user interactions and show that the energy constraints modify the medium access problem significantly, decreasing the price of anarchy. Our results give valuable insights on the energy-throughput tradeoff for contention based systems. © 2011 INRIA.