Error Correction and Equilibrium investigation in Random Access MAC Protocols for Wireless Networks

The present paper concentrates on the random access MAC protocols, where we examine the throughput of the classical Aloha, Slotted Aloha and the Multi-copy Aloha respectively to show the most performing among them in terms of throughput. The integration of Erasure coding in each of these techniques has ameliorate their reliability and transmission level. Here, since each node sends N coded packets instead of the k original packets, we have (N-k) redundant packets. The introduction of redundancy and subsequently structuring it in an exploitable manner, allows serious errors injected by the channel to be corrected. In wireless networks and especially in Mobile ad hoc network (MANET), access at medium is managed by Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) method, which is based primarily on Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) protocol. The nodes in MANET are selfish and non-cooperative, where each node attempts to achieve its best benefit without regard for the other nodes’ actions, this could affect overall system throughput. To analyze such conflicting situations where the action of one node has an impact on the other nodes’ actions, we present a redundant packets control game. A non-cooperative game is introduced and its different characteristics are defined. We investigate the network equilibrium by applying Nash Equilibrium (NE) theorem and we evaluate our results by appropriate simulations. Key-Words: Slotted-Aloha; CSMA; Erasure Coding; Game theory.