An Architectural View of Game Theoretic Control

Citation

Gopalakrishnan, Ragavendran (2010) An Architectural View of Game Theoretic Control. Master's thesis, California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/ZW5K-AF41. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05272010-163702257

Abstract

Resource allocation has long been a fundamental research problem across several disciplines. While traditional approaches to this problem were centralized, recent research has focussed on distributed solutions for resource allocation, for reasons of scalability, reliability and efficiency in many real-world applications. Game-theoretic control is a promising new approach for distributed resource allocation. In this thesis, we describe how game-theoretic control can be viewed as having an intrinsic layered architecture, which provides a modularization that simplifies the control design. We illustrate this architectural view by presenting details about one particular instantiation using potential games as an interface. This example serves to highlight the strengths and limitations of the proposed architecture while also illustrating the relationship between game-theoretic control and other existing approaches to distributed resource allocation. We also demonstrate the power of this approach by reformulating the power control problem in sensor networks as a game-theoretic control problem in the potential games instantiation of our framework. This allows us to relax several assumptions made by previous contributions, and consider more complex objective functions.

Thesis Files