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This unified treatment of game theory focuses on finding state-of-the-art solutions to issues surrounding the next generation of wireless and communications networks. Future networks will rely on autonomous and distributed architectures to improve the efficiency and flexibility of mobile applications, and game theory provides the ideal framework for designing efficient and robust distributed algorithms. This book enables readers to develop a solid understanding of game theory, its applications and its use as an effective tool for addressing wireless communication and networking problems. The key results and tools of game theory are covered, as are various real-world technologies including 3G networks, wireless LANs, sensor networks, dynamic spectrum access and cognitive networks. The book also covers a wide range of techniques for modeling, designing and analysing communication networks using game theory, as well as state-of-the-art distributed design techniques. This is an ideal resource for communications engineers, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students.

Game theoretical techniques have recently become prevalent in many engineering applications, notably in communications. With the emergence of cooperation as a new communication paradigm, and the need for self-organizing, decentralized, and autonomic networks, it has become imperative to seek suitable game theoretical tools that allow to analyze and study the behavior and interactions of the nodes in future communication networks. In this context, this tutorial introduces the concepts of cooperative game theory, namely coalitional games, and their potential applications in communication and wireless networks. For this purpose, we classify coalitional games into three categories: Canonical coalitional games, coalition formation games, and coalitional graph games. This new classification represents an application-oriented approach for understanding and analyzing coalitional games. For each class of coalitional games, we present the fundamental components, introduce the key properties, mathematical techniques, and solution concepts, and describe the methodologies for applying these games in several applications drawn from the state-of-the-art research in communications. In a nutshell, this article constitutes a unified treatment of coalitional game theory tailored to the demands of communications and network engineers.

Many of the original research and survey monographs in pure and applied mathematics published by Birkhcluser in recent decades have been groundbreaking and have come to be regarded as foundational to the subject. Through the MBC Series, a select number of these modern classics, entirely uncorrected, are being re-released in paperback (and as eBooks) to ensure that these treasures remain accessible to new generations of students, scholars, and researchers.