Methodologies for Analyzing Equilibria in Wireless Games

Under certain assumptions in terms of information and models, equilibria correspond to possible stable outcomes in conflicting or cooperative scenarios where rational entities interact. For wireless engineers, it is of paramount importance to be able to predict and even ensure such states at which the network will effectively operate. In this article, we provide non-exhaustive methodologies for characterizing equilibria in wireless games in terms of existence, uniqueness, selection, and efficiency.Comment: To appear in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Sep. 200

Bio-Inspired Paradigms in Network Engineering Games

International audienceNetwork Engineering Games (NEGs) is an emerging branch of game theory developed in Electrical Engineering Departments. It concerns games that arise in all levels of telecommunication networks. There has been a growing interest among researchers in this community in bio-inspired method- ologies in recent years due to two reasons. First, many problems in networking have much in common with problems in biology. Examples are (i) propagation of information in networks, that has similar dynamics as propagation of epi- demics. (ii) energy management issues in wireless networks and competition over resources are often similar to issues by biologists. (iii) both equilibria concepts as well as replicator dynamics that arise in evolutionary games are quite relevant to NEGs. In this paper we present an overview of applications and tools used in network engineering games, we then describe in more depth bio-inspired tools used in or relevant to network engineering. We present - nally an example of a stochastic epidemic game arising in wireless networks that involves competition over the relaying of information