Evolutionary Games for Multiple Access Control: From Egoism to Altruism

This paper studies multiple access games within a large population of mobiles decomposed into several groups. Mobiles interfere with each other through many local interactions. We assume that each mobile (or player) cooperates with its group by taking into account the performance of its group. We parameterize the degree of cooperation which allows to cover the fully non-cooperative behavior, the fully cooperative behavior, and even more, the fully altruistic behavior, all these as special cases of this parameters choice. In this context, we model and study such cases using the theory of evolutionary games which extend to cover this kind of behavior. We define and characterize the equilibrium (called Evolutionary Stable Strategy) for these games and establish the optimal level of cooperation that maximizes the probability of successful transmission and present some optimization issues. We also study the game dynamics both in its classical form and in presence of delays.