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Appendix G - An Introduction to Game Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2017

Rakhesh Singh Kshetrimayum
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati
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Summary

Introduction

Game theory presents a formal analysis of interaction among a group of players in a game. In game theory, the action of player directly affects the other players. There are two types of games:

  • (a) Cooperative game: Player form alliance to bring the result of the game in his/her favour.

  • (b) Non-cooperative game: Optimal strategy for such game is that leads to Nash equilibrium, a term coined after the Nobel Laureate John Nash. Any player cannot gain from varying un-alterably his/her strategy if the strategy of all other players is fixed. An action profile is a vector of player's actions. A Nash equilibrium is an action profile in which each action is the best response to the actions of all the other players. Nash equilibrium is a stable operating or equilibrium point. It means that there is no payoff for any player in a finite game to vary strategy when all the other players pursue the equilibrium policy. The learning process can be cast as a repeated stochastic game (i.e., recast version of a one-shot game). Every player gets or knows the past behavior of the other players, which may influence the present decision to be made. The job of a player is to choose the best mixed strategy, having the knowledge of mixed strategies of all other players in the game. The mixed strategy of a player is a RV whose values are the pure strategies of that player.

  • An example from wireless sensor network:

    For instance, in wireless sensor network, a game needs three components (S. K. Das et al., 2004):

  • (a) Players (sensor nodes in the network)

  • (b) Strategy (criteria for selection of actions of players)

  • (c) Utility (payoff) function is the performance metric.

  • Let us assume a packet is sent from a source node (SN) to a destination node (DN) through an intermediate node (IN). IN may forward the packet to the DN by using the following criteria:

  • (a) Reputation: Have IN and DN made enough reputation to trust and co-operate each other to forward the packet?

  • (b) Distance: The farther are the two nodes, the more they don't trust each other.

  • (c) Traffic: Have IN and DN a joint operation history? Can they trust each other?

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    Publisher: Cambridge University Press
    Print publication year: 2017

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