Introduction

In recent years, wireless networks, especially ad hoc networks that consist of a collection of radio transceivers without requiring centralized administration or a prearranged fixed network infrastructure, have been studied intensively. Considering the application scenarios in which the users are “selfish” and act noncooperatively to maximize their own interests, the performances of such networks will deteriorate dramatically because of the inefficient competition for the wireless resources among selfish users. The greediness of selfish users and the distributed network structure challenge the feasibility of the conventional approaches and require novel techniques for distributed and efficient networking. Thus ensuring cooperation among selfish users becomes an important issue for designing wireless networks.

To ensure the cooperation and study the behaviors of selfish users, game theory is a successful economy tool, which studies the mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent and rational decision makers. In the literature, different types of game approaches have been introduced to several areas of wireless communications. One of the most important is the pricing anarchy, in which a price is taxed for the resource usage so that cooperative behaviors can be enforced. Noncooperation game theory was studied in [268] for power-control problems, in which the pricing technique was used to achieve Pareto optimality. In [369], resource allocation was studied for a forward link two-cell CDMA voice network with multiple service classes. Noncooperative game theory has also been studied for self-organizing mobile ad hoc wireless networks (MANET). In [38, 368], reputation-based game approaches were proposed to encourage packet forwarding among users.