Abstract In this paper we introduce a capacity allocation game which models the problem of maximizing network utility from the perspective of distributed noncooperative agents. Motivated by the idea of self-managed networks, in the developed framework the decision-making entities are associated with individual transmission links, deciding on the way they split capacity among concurrent flows. An efficient decentralized algorithm is given for computing a strongly Pareto-optimal strategies, constituting a pure Nash equilibrium. Subsequently, we discuss the properties of the introduced game related to the Price of Anarchy and Price of Stability. The paper is concluded with an experimental study.
In @cite_1 the co-existence of different congestion avoidance protocols is considered. It is shown that some properties related to the NUM approach do not hold in the presence of heterogeneous congestion signals. Such a situation is explained through game theoretical framework.
@cite_1
2018822343 1517645949 2018446679 2273692058
A general framework is developed for networks with flows that use all available congestion signals to regulate their rates. It is conceptually a generalization of the existing network utility maximization (NUM) theory for homogeneous congestion control. Instead of a convex optimization characterization in NUM, a game with multiple convex optimizations is formulated to characterize equilibria in such a network. Examples are provided to motivate the needs of this general theory. We also provide some basic properties of the game and point out some possible future directions along this line. We study the outcome of natural learning algorithms in atomic congestion games. Atomic congestion games have a wide variety of equilibria often with vastly differing social costs. We show that in almost all such games, the well- known multiplicative-weights learning algorithm results in convergence to pure equilibria. Our results show that nat- ural learning behavior can avoid bad outcomes predicted by the price of anarchy in atomic congestion games such as the load-balancing game introduced by Koutsoupias and Pa- padimitriou, which has super-constant price of anarchy and has correlated equilibria that are exponentially worse than any mixed Nash equilibrium. Our results identify a set of mixed Nash equilibria that we call weakly stable equilibria. Our notion of weakly stable is defined game-theoretically, but we show that this property holds whenever a stability criterion from the theory of dy- namical systems is satisfied. This allows us to show that in every congestion game, the distribution of play converges to the set of weakly stable equilibria. Pure Nash equilibria are weakly stable, and we show using techniques from algebraic geometry that the converse is true with probability 1 when congestion costs are selected at random independently on each edge (from any monotonically parametrized distribu- tion). We further extend our results to show that players can use algorithms with different (sufficiently small) learn- ing rates, i.e. they can trade off convergence speed and long term average regret differently. We consider congestion control in a network with delay sensitive insensitive traffic, modelled by adding explicit delay terms to the utility function measuring user's happiness on the Quality of Service (QoS). A new Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem is formulated and solved in a decentralized way via appropriate algorithms implemented at the users (primal) and or links (dual). For the dual algorithm, delay-independent and delay-dependent stability conditions are derived when propagation delays are taken into account. A system with voice and data traffic is considered as example and the properties of the congestion control algorithm are assessed. Cooperative inter-vehicular applications rely on the exchange of broadcast single-hop status messages among vehicles, called beacons. The aggregated load on the wireless channel due to periodic beacons can prevent the transmission of other types of messages, what is called channel congestion due to beaconing activity. In this paper we approach the problem of controlling the beaconing rate on each vehicle by modeling it as a Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem. This allows us to formally define the notion of fairness of a beaconing rate allocation in vehicular networks. The NUM model provides a rigorous framework to design a broad family of simple and decentralized algorithms, with proved convergence guarantees to a fair allocation solution. In this context, we propose the Fair Adaptive Beaconing Rate for Intervehicular Communications (FABRIC) algorithm, which uses a particular scaled gradient projection algorithm to solve the dual of the NUM problem. Simulation results validate our approach and show that, unlike recent proposals, FABRIC converges to fair rate allocations in multi-hop and dynamic scenarios.