This article is part of the series Game Theory in Signal Processing and Communications.

Open Access Research Article

Stackelberg Contention Games in Multiuser Networks

Jaeok Park1* and Mihaela van der Schaar2

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477, USA

2 Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA 90095-1594, USA

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2009, 2009:305978  doi:10.1155/2009/305978


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2009/1/305978


Received: 2 October 2008
Accepted: 10 February 2009
Published: 24 March 2009

© 2009 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Interactions among selfish users sharing a common transmission channel can be modeled as a noncooperative game using the game theory framework. When selfish users choose their transmission probabilities independently without any coordination mechanism, Nash equilibria usually result in a network collapse. We propose a methodology that transforms the noncooperative game into a Stackelberg game. Stackelberg equilibria of the Stackelberg game can overcome the deficiency of the Nash equilibria of the original game. A particular type of Stackelberg intervention is constructed to show that any positive payoff profile feasible with independent transmission probabilities can be achieved as a Stackelberg equilibrium payoff profile. We discuss criteria to select an operating point of the network and informational requirements for the Stackelberg game. We relax the requirements and examine the effects of relaxation on performance.

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