Performance guarantees through partial information based control in multichannel wireless networks

We consider a wireless system with multiple channels when each channel has several transmission states. A user learns about the instantaneous state of an available channel by transmitting a control packet in it. In presence of multiple channels, this process of probing every channel to find the best one consumes significant energy and time. So a user needs to select a channel based only on partial information about instantaneous states of available channels. Furthermore, a user not only needs to optimize its selection based on the information it has, but also needs to determine what and how much information it needs to acquire about the instantaneous states of the available channels. We investigate desired tradeoffs between information acquisition and exploitation in context of wireless networks. We seek to maximize a utility function which depends on both the cost and value of information, and obtain computationally simple joint information acquisition and exploitation strategies that attain constant factor approximations of the optimal solution.