  Fifth generation (5G) dense small cell networks (SCNs) are expected to meet
the thousand-fold mobile traffic challenge within the next few years. When
developing solution schemes for resource allocation problems in such networks,
conventional centralized control is no longer viable due to excessive
computational complexity and large signaling overhead caused by the large
number of users and network nodes in such a network. Instead, distributed
resource allocation (or decision making) methods with low complexity would be
desirable to make the network self-organizing and autonomous. Minority game
(MG) has recently gained attention of the research community as a tool to model
and solve distributed resource allocation problems. The main objective of this
article is to study the applicability of the MG to solve the distributed
decision making problems in future wireless networks. We present the
fundamental theoretical aspects of basic MG, some variants of MG, and the
notion of equilibrium. We also study the current state-of-the-art on the
applications of MGs in communication networks. Furthermore, we describe an
example application of MG to SCNs, where the problem of computation offloading
by users in an SCN is modeled and analyzed using MG.
