Strategic subchannel resource allocation for cooperative OFDMA Wireless Mesh Networks

International audience—Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are emerging as a key solution to provide broadband and mobile wireless con-nectivity in a flexible and cost effective way. In suburban areas, a common deployment model relies on OFDMA communications between WMN router nodes, with one WMN node installed at each user premises. In this paper, we investigate a possible user cooperation path to implement strategic resource allocation in OFDMA WMNs, under the assumption that users want to control their interconnection. In this case, a novel strategic situation appears: how much a WMN node can demand, how much it can obtain and how this shall depend on the interference with its neighbors. Strategic interference management and resource allocation mechanisms are needed to avoid performance degradation during congestion cases among WMN nodes. In this paper, we model the problem as a bankruptcy game taking into account the interference among WMN nodes. We identify possible solutions from cooperative game theory, namely the Shapley value and the Nucleolus, and show through extensive simulations of realistic scenarios that they outperform two state-of-the-art OFDMA allocation schemes, namely Centralized-Dynamic Frequency Planning, C-DFP, and Frequency-ALOHA, F-ALOHA. In particular, the Nucleolus solution offers best performance overall in terms of throughput and fairness, at a lower time complexity