TLTE3090 Telecommunication Seminar

Spring 2008 Topic:

An Introduction to Game Theory with Application in Communication Engineering

Lecturer: Mohammed Elmusrati

Introduction:

• Is it possible to quantify the behavior of people or the action of countries as a response for certain events?

• Can you describe your relations with the environment (which may include other people, your computer, your car, the weather, and so on) by mathematics?

• Actually every one (can be on human level, society level, country level, or even inhuman levels such as animals up to virus levels) has certain objectives want (and may work) to achieve them.

• A word GAME should not be seen as a word for “fun”. For example one country may start war with another country where may be hundred of thousand of people killed and huge properties loss to achieve certain objectives or define new rules for certain game!!

• Some other countries want to obtain nuclear weapons, not to use them, but to achieve certain objectives and to make new rules within its games.

• For telecommunication, assume certain channel with finite bandwidth, and many transmitters want to access it using their resources such as transmit power, usage time and data rate.

• If one transmitter decided just to use its maximum power and data rate all time (generally stupid decision, unless it guarantees its win!), then it will introduce high interference to others, hence, all other transmitters may increase their transmit power as well. In this situation, all communication links may collapse and congested!

• Game theory can be defined as the study of mathematical models of conflicts and cooperations between intelligent rational decision-makers.

• Game theory provides general mathematical techniques for analyzing situations in which two or more individuals (can be controllers) make decisions that will influence one another’s welfare (or performance).

• The individuals involved in a game may be called players

• Game Theory = Conflict Analysis

In this course we will study the basic concepts of game theory from theoretical point of view such as:

· Game Modeling

· Game Matrix

· Saddle points and Optimal Strategies

· Mixed Strategies

· Best Response Strategies

· Solution Techniques for Matrix Games

· Cooperative and Non-cooperative Games

Then we will study different applications of game theory on telecommunications such as on radio resource management and MIMO antennas.

References:

For game theory concepts we will use:

· E. N. Barron, Game Theory: An Introduction, Wiley 2008, ISBN: 978-0-470-17132-5

· R. Myerson, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict, Harvard Press, 1997

· Game theory application on telecommunication will be covered from literature (e.g., IEEE Transactions)