Hierarchical Network Formation Games in the Uplink of Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

— In this paper, we propose a game theoretic approach to tackle the problem of the distributed formation of the hierarchical network architecture that connects the nodes in the uplink of a wireless multi-hop network. Unlike existing literature which focused on the performance assessment of hierarchical multi-hop networks given an existing topology, this paper investigates the problem of the formation of this topology among a number of nodes that seek to send data in the uplink to a central base station through multihop. We model the problem as a hierarchical network formation game and we divide the network into different hierarchy levels, whereby the nodes belonging to the same level engage in a noncooperative Nash game for selecting their next hop. As a solution to the game, we propose a novel equilibrium concept, the hierarchical Nash equilibrium, for a sequence of multi-stage Nash games, which can be found by backward induction analytically. For finding this equilibrium, we propo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Walid Saad, Quanyan Zhu, Tamer Basar, Zhu Han, Are Hjørungnes
• Keywords: GLOBECOM 2009, Hierarchical, Hierarchical Network, Multi-hop Networks, Telecommunications