Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Aloha Games with Channel Capture

Game theory has been a useful tool for the analysis of random-access based wireless networks due to their decentralized operations. This paper studies one of the most widely used random access schemes, slotted Aloha, by modeling it as games. Unlike other game theoretic analyses of slotted Aloha, channel capture is assumed in this paper. Two different types of Aloha games, cooperative and non-cooperative, are considered since scenarios for behaviors of mobile terminals in slotted Aloha systems can be twofold. With analysis, a threshold strategy, quite a simple strategy characterized only by the threshold value, is shown to be a potential optimal strategy for the cooperative game, and is also shown to be the unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) for the non-cooperative game. Numerical examples provide the threshold values for the optimal strategies and BNEs with different system configurations.