Bio-inspired paradigms in Network Engineering Games

Network Engineering Games (NEGs) is a new emmerging branch of game theory that has been developing 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 methodologies in recent years. This is due to two reasons. First, many problems in networking have a lot in common with problems encountered in biology. Some examples are (i) propagation of information in networks, that has often a similar dynamics as the propagation of epidemics within the population. (ii) energy management issues in wireless networks and competition over resources are often similar to issues that have been studied by biologists. Secondly, both equilibria concepts as well as replicator dynamics that arise in evolutionary games are quite relevant to NEGs. In this paper we first present an overview of applications and of tools used in network engineering games, we then describe in more depth bio-inspired tools used in or relevant to network engineering games. We present finally an example of a stochastic epidemic game arising in wireless networks that involves competition over the relaying of information.