Stochastic Learning Solution for Distributed Discrete Power Control Game in Wireless Data Networks

Distributed power control is an important issue in wireless networks. Recently, noncooperative game theory has been applied to investigate interesting solutions to this problem. The majority of these studies assumes that the transmitter power level can take values in a continuous domain. However, recent trends such as the GSM standard and Qualcomm's proposal to the IS-95 standard use a finite number of discretized power levels. This motivates the need to investigate solutions for distributed discrete power control which is the primary objective of this paper. We first note that, by simply discretizing, the previously proposed continuous power adaptation techniques will not suffice. This is because a simple discretization does not guarantee convergence and uniqueness. We propose two probabilistic power adaptation algorithms and analyze their theoretical properties along with the numerical behavior. The distributed discrete power control problem is formulated as an N-person, nonzero sum game. In this game, each user evaluates a power strategy by computing a utility value. This evaluation is performed using a stochastic iterative procedures. We approximate the discrete power control iterations by an equivalent ordinary differential equation to prove that the proposed stochastic learning power control algorithm converges to a stable Nash equilibrium. Conditions when more than one stable Nash equilibrium or even only mixed equilibrium may exist are also studied. Experimental results are presented for several cases and compared with the continuous power level adaptation solutions.