Congestion games with resource reuse and applications in spectrum sharing

In this paper we consider an extension to the classical definition of congestion games (CG) in which multiple users share the same set of resources and their payoff for using any resource is a function of the total number of users sharing it. The classical congestion games enjoy some very appealing properties, including the existence of a Nash equilibrium and that every improvement path is finite and leads to such a NE (also called the finite improvement property or FIP), which is also a local optimum to a potential function. On the other hand, this class of games does not model well the congestion or resource sharing in a wireless context, a prominent feature of which is spatial reuse. What this translates to in the context of a congestion game is that a user's payoff for using a resource (interpreted as a channel) is a function of the its number of its interfering users sharing that channel, rather than the total number among all users. This makes the problem quite different. We will call this the congestion game with resource reuse (CG-RR). In this paper we study intrinsic properties of such a game; in particular, we seek to address under what conditions on the underlying network this game possesses the FIP or NE. We also discuss the implications of these results when applied to wireless spectrum sharing.