Abstract
Cooperative Wireless Networks (CWN) have become an attractive alternative for providing ubiquitous and inexpensive connectivity to mobile users. In a CWN, some hot-spot areas may experience the problem of sporadic congestions. The appearance of this localized congestion adversely impacts the network performance in terms of effective throughput, leading to a Quality of User Experience (QoE) degradation. The challenge then is how to ensure the QoE for the access to services, in this unplanned type of networks. This paper proposes a QoE for CWN with no centralized entities, which is based on the IEEE 802.11e amendment to the IEEE 802.11 Standard, and employs a game theory approach. The proposed scheme permits the distribution of the load between different Access Points. It also provides to the users a mechanism for the selection of the best Access Point in order to satisfy their requirements, and to guarantee the equilibrium in the network.
