Incentive Mechanism Design for Unicast Service Provisioning With Network Aggregative Game

We investigate the problem of distributed resource allocation in unicast communication networks with strategic/selfish users. First, through mechanism design, the centralized problem is converted to a decentralized problem that induces a network aggregative game among users. At every Nash equilibrium, this mechanism strongly implements the solution of the resource allocation problem, and it is budget balance as well. Then, we establish a relationship between Nash equilibria of the induced game and the solutions of the corresponding variational inequality problem. Next, a distributed algorithm is proposed, and finally, its converges to the Nash equilibrium of the induced game is proved under certain assumptions. Since each link can be shared among a different set of users, there is a specific connectivity graph among the users of each link. Hence, a user simultaneously utilizes multiple connectivity graphs to interact with different sets of neighbors on different links.

Automated summary

This study investigates the problem of distributed resource allocation in unicast communication networks with strategic/selfish users. It converts the centralized problem to a decentralized problem through mechanism design, which induces a network aggregative game among users. The proposed algorithm ensures the convergence to the Nash equilibrium of the induced game under certain assumptions.