MEAN FIELD GAME-THEORETIC FRAMEWORK FOR INTERFERENCE AND ENERGY-AWARE CONTROL IN 5G ULTRA-DENSE NETWORKS

Ultra-dense small cells with D2D communications can provide rich multimedia services for billions of smart terminals. Game theory helps to characterize rational behaviors, model strategic interactions, and design distributed algorithms. However, conventional games have been facing great challenges, for example, the number of the nodes is huge, thus leading to the well known curse of dimensionality. 5G ultra-dense networks call for an advanced game-theoretic framework, which should make it easy to analyze and facilitate distributed control policy, even when coupled with huge and complex interference state dynamics. In this article, we briefly survey the latest applications of advanced games. Following that, we summarize the most important features of 5G game-theoretic design. Then, we introduce the mean field game with its basics and survey the related applications. The mean field game can well satisfy the interference and energy-aware featured game requirements. Finally, we present an application of the mean field game in D2D communications with interference and remaining energy dynamics. We also look into the future research directions of mean field games in other 5G ultra-dense networking paradigms.