Information Acquisition and Exploitation in Multichannel Wireless Networks

A wireless system with multiple channels is considered, where each channel has several transmission states. A user learns about the instantaneous state of an available channel by transmitting a control packet in it. Since probing all channels consumes significant energy and time, a user needs to determine what and how much information it needs to acquire about the instantaneous states of the available channels so that it can maximize its transmission rate. This motivates the study of the trade-off between the cost of information acquisition and its value towards improving the transmission rate. A simple model is presented for studying this information acquisition and exploitation trade-off when the channels are multi-state, with different distributions and information acquisition costs. The objective is to maximize a utility function which depends on both the cost and value of information. Solution techniques are presented for computing near-optimal policies with succinct representati...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Sudipto Guha, Kamesh Munagala, Saswati Sarkar
• Keywords: Available Channels, CORR 2008, Education, Information Acquisition, Instantaneous States