A Leader–Follower Controlled Markov Stopping Game for Delay Tolerant and Opportunistic Resource Sharing Networks

In various resource sharing networks, opportunistic resources with dynamic quality are often present for the users to exploit. As many user tasks are delay-tolerant, this favorably allows the network users to wait for and access the opportunistic resource at the time of its best quality. For such delay-tolerant and opportunistic resource sharing networks, the resource accessing strategies developed in the literature suffer from three limitations. First, they mainly focused on single-user scenarios, whereas the competition from other users is ignored. Second, the influence from the resource seller who may take actions to manipulate the resource sharing procedure is not considered. Third, the impact of the actions from both the network users and the resource seller on the resource quality dynamics is not considered either. To overcome these limitations, a leader–follower controlled Markov stopping game (LF-C-MSG) is developed in this paper. The derived Stackelberg equilibrium strategy of the LF-C-MSG can be used to guide the behaviors of both the network users and the resource seller for better performance and resource utilization efficiency. Two exemplary applications of the proposed LF-C-MSG are presented, along with corresponding numerical results to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.