A Comprehensive Survey of Potential Game Approaches to Wireless Networks

Potential games form a class of non-cooperative games where unilateral improvement dynamics are guaranteed to converge in many practical cases. The potential game approach has been applied to a wide range of wireless network problems, particularly to a variety of channel assignment problems. In this paper, the properties of potential games are introduced, and games in wireless networks that have been proven to be potential games are comprehensively discussed.Comment: 44 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E98-B, no. 9, Sept. 201

Game-theoretic Resource Allocation Methods for Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication

Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks allows mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to use the licensed spectrum allocated to cellular services for direct peer-to-peer transmission. D2D communication can use either one-hop transmission (i.e., in D2D direct communication) or multi-hop cluster-based transmission (i.e., in D2D local area networks). The D2D devices can compete or cooperate with each other to reuse the radio resources in D2D networks. Therefore, resource allocation and access for D2D communication can be treated as games. The theories behind these games provide a variety of mathematical tools to effectively model and analyze the individual or group behaviors of D2D users. In addition, game models can provide distributed solutions to the resource allocation problems for D2D communication. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the applications of game-theoretic models to study the radio resource allocation issues in D2D communication. The article also outlines several key open research directions.Comment: Accepted. IEEE Wireless Comms Mag. 201

ECONOMIC APPROACHES AND MARKET STRUCTURES FOR TEMPORAL-SPATIAL SPECTRUM SHARING

In wireless communication systems, economic approaches can be applied to spectrum sharing and enhance spectrum utilization. In this research, we develop a model where geographic information, including licensed areas of primary users (PUs) and locations of secondary users (SUs), plays an important role in the spectrum sharing system. We consider a multi-price policy and the pricing power of noncooperative PUs in multiple geographic areas. Meanwhile, the value assessment of a channel is price-related and the demand from the SUs is price-elastic. By applying an evolutionary procedure, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the optimal payoff for each PU selling channels without reserve. In the scenario of selling channels with reserve, we predict the channel prices for the PUs leading to the optimal supplies of the PUs and hence the optimal payoffs. To increase spectrum utilization, the scenario of spatial spectrum reuse is considered. We consider maximizing social welfare via on-demand channel allocation, which describes the overall satisfaction of the SUs when we involve the supply and demand relationship. We design a receiver-centric spectrum reuse mechanism, in which the optimal channel allocation that maximizes social welfare can be achieved by the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction for maximal independent groups (MIGs). We prove that truthful bidding is the optimal strategy for the SUs, even though the SUs do not participate in the VCG auction for MIGs directly. Therefore, the MIGs are bidding truthfully and the requirement for social welfare maximization is satisfied. To further improve user satisfaction, user characteristics that enable heterogeneous channel valuations need to be considered in spatial spectrum reuse. We design a channel transaction mechanism for non-symmetric networks and maximize user satisfaction in consideration of multi-level flexible channel valuations of the SUs. Specifically, we introduce a constrained VCG auction. To facilitate the bid formation, we transform the constrained VCG auction to a step-by-step decision process. Meanwhile, the SUs in a coalition play a coalitional game with transferable utilities. We use the Shapley value to realize fair payoff distribution among the SUs in a coalition

Combining Spot and Futures Markets: A Hybrid Market Approach to Dynamic Spectrum Access

Dynamic spectrum access is a new paradigm of secondary spectrum utilization and sharing. It allows unlicensed secondary users (SUs) to exploit opportunistically the under-utilized licensed spectrum. Market mechanism is a widely-used promising means to regulate the consuming behaviours of users and, hence, achieves the efficient allocation and consumption of limited resources. In this paper, we propose and study a hybrid secondary spectrum market consisting of both the futures market and the spot market, in which SUs (buyers) purchase under-utilized licensed spectrum from a spectrum regulator, either through predefined contracts via the futures market, or through spot transactions via the spot market. We focus on the optimal spectrum allocation among SUs in an exogenous hybrid market that maximizes the secondary spectrum utilization efficiency. The problem is challenging due to the stochasticity and asymmetry of network information. To solve this problem, we first derive an off-line optimal allocation policy that maximizes the ex-ante expected spectrum utilization efficiency based on the stochastic distribution of network information. We then propose an on-line VickreyCClarkeCGroves (VCG) auction that determines the real-time allocation and pricing of every spectrum based on the realized network information and the pre-derived off-line policy. We further show that with the spatial frequency reuse, the proposed VCG auction is NP-hard; hence, it is not suitable for on-line implementation, especially in a large-scale market. To this end, we propose a heuristics approach based on an on-line VCG-like mechanism with polynomial-time complexity, and further characterize the corresponding performance loss bound analytically. We finally provide extensive numerical results to evaluate the performance of the proposed solutions.Comment: This manuscript is the complete technical report for the journal version published in INFORMS Operations Researc