CDMA Uplink Power Control as a Noncooperative Game

We present a game-theoretic treatment of distributed power control in CDMA wireless systems. We make use of the conceptual framework of noncooperative game theory to obtain a distributed and market-based control mechanism. Thus, we address not only the power control problem, but also pricing and allocation of a single resource among several users. A cost function is introduced as the difference between the pricing and utility functions, and the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium is established. In addition, two update algorithms, namely, parallel update and random update, are shown to be globally stable under specific conditions. Convergence properties and robustness of each algorithm are also studied through extensive simulations.