Dynamically Tuning Aggression Levels for Capacity-Region-Aware Medium Access Control in Wireless Networks

Abstract

We propose adaptive capacity-region-aware algorithms for medium access control in wireless networks. In particular, the proposed algorithms are aware of the information-theoretic capacity region of a multiple access channel. According to the proposed algorithms, a node dynamically adjusts its channel access strategy based on the previous strategies of other nodes and the channel feedback. A strategy is composed of a transmission threshold and an aggression level. We propose symmetric learning algorithms for maximizing throughput. In addition, we propose asymmetric learning algorithms to strike a good balance between throughput and fairness. Furthermore, we propose novel methods to properly choose a finite number of available data transmission rates. We use both analytical results and simulation results to justify the usage of the proposed algorithms.