N-Player Game in a Multiple Access Channel is Selfish

This paper studies behavior of players in a common exclusively-shared channel using a backoff protocol for resolving collisions. We show that when players have freedom to choose backoff parameters (or time to send a next packet), they behave selfishly. The system has an undesirable Nash equilibrium, where every player tries to grasp as much channel as possible. Since the channel is exclusively shared, no player would get a packet through (all packets will collide). Although the result is seemingly obvious, we were unable to find it in the literature. We also evaluate a simple incentive mechanism based on an arbiter model, which controls channel access by jamming misbehaving players.