Noncooperative Satellite Range Scheduling with perfect information

The Satellite Range Scheduling problem has been traditionally approached in a centralized manner. Existing literature provides a wide variety of sub-optimal algorithms for allocating communication times between a list of satellites and a network of ground stations. The authors have provided an optimal solution for this problem in previous work. But regardless of the optimality, the application of a centralized solution in a distributed system raises the question: could a selfish party improve its schedule by unilaterally deviating from the precomputed centralized solution? Through a game theoretic approach where all the parties act selfishly, the authors show that the system converges to an Stackelberg equilibrium which can be computed in polynomial time for a fixed number of players. Results are illustrated via simple numerical example.