Coalitional game theory for communication networks
Walid Saad2000, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine
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Abstract
Game theoretical techniques have recently become prevalent in many engineering applications, notably in communications. With the emergence of cooperation as a new communication paradigm, and the need for self-organizing, decentralized, and autonomic networks, it has become imperative to seek suitable game theoretical tools that allow to analyze and study the behavior and interactions of the nodes in future communication networks. In this context, this tutorial introduces the concepts of cooperative game theory, namely coalitional games, and their potential applications in communication and wireless networks. For this purpose, we classify coalitional games into three categories: Canonical coalitional games, coalition formation games, and coalitional graph games. This new classification represents an application-oriented approach for understanding and analyzing coalitional games. For each class of coalitional games, we present the fundamental components, introduce the key properties, mathematical techniques, and solution concepts, and describe the methodologies for applying these games in several applications drawn from the state-of-the-art research in communications. In a nutshell, this article constitutes a unified treatment of coalitional game theory tailored to the demands of communications and network engineers.
Key takeaways
- Recently, there has been an increasing interest in coalitional games where the value of a coalition depends on the partition of N that is in place at any time during the game.
- A simple game is a coalitional game where the value are either 0 or 1, i.e., v(S) ∈ {0, 1}, ∀S ⊆ N and the grand coalition has v(N ) = 1.
- Hence, unlike canonical games where formal solutions exist, the solution of a coalition formation game depends on the model and the objectives that are being considered.
- In addition, the evolution of this structure is important, notably when changes to the game nature can occur due to external or internal factors (e.g., what happens to the coalition structure if one or more players leave the game).
- In the presence of a cooperative cost, this partition form game falls in the class of coalition formation games.
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