Game Theoretic Optimal User Association in Emergency Networks

The availability of effective communications in post-disaster scenarios is key to implement emergency networks that enable the sharing of critical information and support the coordination of the emergency response. To deliver those levels of QoS suitable to these applications, it is vital to exploit the multiple communication opportunities made available by the progressive deployment of the 5G and Smart City paradigms, ranging from ad-hoc networks among smartphones and surviving IoT devices, to cellular networks but also drone-based and vehicle-based wireless access networks. Therefore, the user device should be able to opportunistically select the most convenient among them to satisfy the demands for QoS imposed by the applications and also minimize the power consumption. The driving idea of this paper is to leverage non-cooperative game theory to design such an opportunistic user association strategy in a post-disaster scenario using UAV ad-hoc networks. The adaptive game-theoretic scheme allows increasing of the QoS of the communication means by lowering the loss rate and also keeps moderate the energy consumption.