Abstract
This work addresses the problem of joint uplink and downlink bandwidth allocation in a WiMAX network consisting of a base station (BS) and a number of non-collaborative subscriber stations (SSs). Most of the existing bandwidth allocation mechanisms do not take into account joint rate allocation uplink and downlink streams. Besides, the selfish behaviors of SSs were seldom considered. The selfish users can affect the results of bandwidth allocation by misrepresenting their bandwidth demands to the BS, leading to unfair bandwidth allocation. The economists have studied this issue for a long time and proposed game theoretical approaches to solve this problem. The game theoretical approaches have been adopted by a few research works to solve the problems caused by the selfish users for video transport over WLANs. However, this mechanism is a negotiation process and often needs to take quite a few time to converge to a stable solution and may not completely prevent the negatively effects caused by these strategic users. To overcome these problems, we propose a Search Based Pricing Mechanism based on the game theoretical approaches to reduce the communication time and effectively mitigate the negative effect caused by strategic behavior. Our simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can reduce the communication time significantly as well as converges stably to optimal solutions in small number of iterations.