Wireless communication networks have evolved over time to highly complex and large-scale systems and are often operated by various decentralized network entities. Along with this evolution, traditional centralized control techniques with pure engineering concerns no longer apply due to the lack of economic design to reconcile the conflict of interest or even competition among selfish network entities. Economic incentive is also needed when emerging communication architectures require cooperation among various network entities to share limited resources (e.g., spectrum and energy) or couse expensive infrastructures (e.g., cellular-WiFi networks).

This special issue aims to bring together state-of-the-art research contributions on the application of economic and game-theoretic models and principles to address challenges in the deployment and optimization of communication networks and services. We invite submissions of original completed work not currently under review by any other journal describing theoretical contributions or applications to cases of interest.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Game theory in communications, networking, and services
• 5G communication systems: economics viability and resource optimization
• Green communications: energy efficient design and cost minimization
• Dynamic spectrum access: spectrum sharing, spectrum market, and TV white space
• Cooperative communications: cooperative protocol and incentive mechanism design
• Cellular-WiFi networks: business model, cost and revenue sharing, etc.
• Mobile social networks: policy, model, and business
• Mobile crowdsourcing: learning and incentive mechanism design
• Mobile cloud computing systems
• Mobile video caching and distribution
• Wireless virtualization
• Smart grid communications: pricing and demand side management, etc.