Slotted Aloha as a game with partial information

This paper studies distributed choice of retransmission probabilities in slotted ALOHA. Both the cooperative team problem as well as the noncooperative game problem are considered. Unlike some previous work, we assume that mobiles do not know the number of backlogged packets at other nodes. A Markov chain analysis is used to obtain optimal and equilibrium retransmission probabilities and throughput. We then investigate the impact of adding retransmission costs (which may represent the disutility for power consumption) on the equilibrium and show how this pricing can be used to make the equilibrium throughput coincide with the optimal team throughput.