Multihoming of Users to Access Points in WLANs: A Population Game Perspective

Abstract

We consider non-cooperative mobiles, each faced with the problem of which subset of WLANs access points (APs) to connect and multihome to, and how to split its traffic among them. Considering the many users regime, we obtain a potential game model and study its equilibrium. We obtain pricing for which the total throughput is maximized at equilibrium and study the convergence to equilibrium under various evolutionary dynamics. We also study the case where the Internet service provider (ISP) could charge prices greater than that of the cost price mechanism and show that even in this case multihoming is desirable.