Channel allocation in dense Wi-Fi networks is a complex problem due to its nonlinear and exponentially sized solution space. Negotiating over this domain is a challenge, since it is difficult to estimate opponent’s utility. Based on our previous work in mediated techniques, we propose the first two fully-distributed multi-agent negotiations for Wi-Fi channel assignment. Both of them use a simulated annealing sampling process and a noisy model graph estimation. One is designed for Alternating Offers protocols, while the other uses the novel Multiple Offers Protocol for Multilateral Negotiations with Partial Consensus (MOPaC), with experimental promising features for our particular domain. Our experiments compare both proposals against their mediated counterparts, showing similar results on social welfare, Nash product and fairness, but improving privacy and communication overhead.

Automated negotiation mechanisms can be helpful in contexts where users want to reach mutually satisfactory agreements about issues of shared interest, especially for complex problems with many interdependent issues. A variety of automated negotiation mechanisms have been proposed in the literature. The effectiveness of those mechanisms, however, may depend on the characteristics of the underlying negotiation problem (e.g. on the complexity of participant’s utility functions, as well as the degree of conflict between participants). While one mechanism may be a good choice for a negotiation problem, it may be a poor choice for another. In this paper, we pursue the problem of selecting the most effective negotiation mechanism given a particular problem by (1) defining a set of scenario metrics to capture the relevant features of negotiation problems, (2) evaluating the performance of a range of negotiation mechanisms on a diverse test suite of negotiation scenarios, (3) applying machine learning techniques to identify which mechanisms work best with which scenarios, and (4) demonstrating that using these classification rules for mechanism selection enables significantly better negotiation performance than any single mechanism alone

This paper focuses on enabling the use of negotiation for complex system optimisation, which main challenge nowadays is scalability. Our hypothesis is that analysing the underlying network structure of these systems can help divide the problems in subproblems which facilitate distributed decision making through negotiation in these domains. In this paper, we verify this hypothesis with an extensive set of scenarios for a proof-of-concept problem. After selecting a set of network metrics for analysis, we cluster the scenarios according to these metrics and evaluate a set of mediation mechanisms in each cluster. The validation experiments show that the relative performance of the different mediation mechanisms change for each cluster, which confirms that network-based metrics may be useful for mechanism selection in complex networks.