Implicit Coordination in Two-Agent Team Problems; Application to Distributed Power Allocation

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how two agents can coordinate their actions in a team setting where one has full information and the other has none, applying the findings to optimize distributed power allocation in interference channels.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for assessing the performance limits of two-agent teams with asymmetric information, applied to distributed power control in wireless networks.

Findings

The informed agent's actions can effectively communicate channel state information.

Optimal strategies improve sum-rate performance in interference channels.

The approach bridges coordination theory and practical power allocation problems.

Abstract

The central result of this paper is the analysis of an optimization problem which allows one to assess the limiting performance of a team of two agents who coordinate their actions. One agent is fully informed about the past and future realizations of a random state which affects the common payoff of the agents whereas the other agent has no knowledge about the state. The informed agent can exchange his knowledge with the other agent only through his actions. This result is applied to the problem of distributed power allocation in a two-transmitter $M-$band interference channel, $M\geq 1$, in which the transmitters (who are the agents) want to maximize the sum-rate under the single-user decoding assumption at the two receivers; in such a new setting, the random state is given by the global channel state and the sequence of power vectors used by the informed transmitter is a code which conveys information about the channel to the other transmitter.