Performance of Random Access Games over an IEEE 802.11ac Testbed

It is well known that the wireless networks following the IEEE 802.11 standard do not achieve high throughput and short-term fairness when the network size is large. Many game-theoretic random access MAC protocols have been proposed to address this limitation. Performance of game-theory based protocols can be precisely analyzed, predicted and tuned unlike protocols based on purely ad-hoc arguments. In this paper, we implement game-theoretic CSMA MAC protocols in an indoor IEEE 802.11ac wireless network testbed. We perform extensive experiments for various network configurations. Measurements indicate that the game-based models achieve higher average throughput, lower access delay and lower access delay deviation compared to the standard DCF algorithm.