Distributed massive MIMO network games: Risk and altruism

With the explosive growth in wireless usage due in part to smart phones, tablets and a growing applications developer base, wireless operators are constantly looking for ways to increase the spectral efficiency of their networks with low power. Multiple input/ multiple output (MIMO) technology, which made its first broad commercial appearance in IEEE 802.11 systems, is now gaining substantial attention in mobile wireless wide area network with the launch of interoperable implementation of IEEE 802.16 and Long-Term Evolution networks. MIMO is a key technology in these networks which substantially improves network throughput, capacity and coverage. In this paper we investigate throughput sharing strategies in distributed massive MIMO network games where the users take into consideration not only their own throughout and risk but also the throughput of their neighborhood and subnetwork users. We provide equilibrium analysis and deduce the ex-post performance and network fairness. We show that, in presence of altruistic users, the sharing strategies improve the throughput fairness when the geodesic distance of the network is not large.