A Survey of Game Theory in Wireless Networking Design

Game theory is a discipline aimed at modeling situations in which decision makers have mutual, possibly conflicting interests. Although originally developed in the field of economics, it has also been applied to wireless networking design in the past several years. Some of the competitive environment in wireless networks lends itself naturally to a game theoretic formulation. In this paper, we survey the recent literature on theoretical analysis of wireless networks, especially in the perspective of power control, medium access control, routing and packet forwarding. Several game formulation methods are investigated and the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium point of these games are carefully examined.