Fundamental Tradeoffs and Constrained Coalitional Games in Autonomic Wireless Networks

Autonomic networks depend on collaboration between their nodes for all their functionalities. The nodes, even if modeled as selfish, gain from such collaboration, in the sense that they can accomplish functionality and performance that is impossible to achieve without such collaboration. However, such gains from collaboration do not come for free. There are costs for such collaboration incurred by each node (e.g. energy consumption for forwarding other nodes packets). In this paper we use constrained coalitional games (i.e. collaborative dynamic games subject to constraints or costs for collaboration) to investigate several key problems in autonomic wireless networks including: network formation, efficient topologies and stability of coalitions.