Revisiting Optimal Power Control: its Dual Effect on SNR and Contention (1309.3716v1)

Abstract: In this paper we study a transmission power tune problem with densely deployed 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). While previous papers emphasize on tuning transmission power with either PHY or MAC layer separately, optimally setting each Access Point's (AP's) transmission power of a densely deployed 802.11 network considering its dual effects on both layers remains an open problem. In this work, we design a measure by evaluating impacts of transmission power on network performance on both PHY and MAC layers. We show that such an optimization problem is intractable and then we investigate and develop an analytical framework to allow simple yet efficient solutions. Through simulations and numerical results, we observe clear benefits of the dual-effect model compared to solutions optimizing solely on a single layer; therefore, we conclude that tuning transmission power from a dual layer (PHY-MAC) point of view is essential and necessary for dense WLANs. We further form a game theoretical framework and investigate above power-tune problem in a strategic network. We show that with decentralized and strategic users, the Nash Equilibrium (N.E.) of the corresponding game is in-efficient and thereafter we propose a punishment based mechanism to enforce users to adopt the social optimal strategy profile under both perfect and imperfect sensing environments.