Coalitional game theory for communication networks

TLDR

Game theory has become a key tool in engineering, especially communications, and the rise of cooperative, self‑organizing, decentralized networks demands suitable game‑theoretic frameworks to analyze node interactions. This tutorial introduces cooperative game theory, classifies coalitional games into canonical, coalition‑formation, and coalitional‑graph categories, and offers a unified treatment for communication engineers. The authors detail each game class’s fundamental components, key properties, mathematical techniques, solution concepts, and application methodologies for communication systems. The resulting classification provides an application‑oriented framework for understanding and analyzing coalitional games in future communication networks.

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, solution concepts, and describe the methodologies for applying these games in several applications drawn from the state-of-theart 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.