Power control with partial observation in wireless ad hoc networks

Abstract: In this paper, the well-known forwarder's dilemma is generalized by accounting for the presence of link quality fluctuations; the forwarder's dilemma is a four-node interaction model with two source nodes and two destination nodes. It is known to be very useful to study ad hoc networks. To characterize the long-term utility region when the source nodes have to control their power with partial channel state information (CSI), we resort to a recent result in Shannon theory. It is shown how to exploit this theoretical result to find the long-term utility region and determine good power control policies. This region is of prime importance since it provides the best performance possible for a given knowledge at the nodes. Numerical results provide several new insights into the repeated forwarder's dilemma power control problem; for instance, the knowledge of global CSI only brings a marginal performance improvement with respect to the local CSI case.