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.