Most of the end-to-end congestion control schemes are "voluntary'' in nature and critically depend on end-user cooperation. Using a game-theoretic approach we show that, in the presence of selfish users, all such schemes may lead to a congestion collapse.
In this paper we propose a class of switch scheduling algorithms called the Diminishing Weight Schedulers (DWS) that have many desirable game-theoretic properties. With DWS scheduling, max-min fair allocation turns out to be a Nash and Stackelberg Equilibrium. Thus, the "best selfish end-user behaviour'' is to estimate the max-min fair rate and send traffic at that rate. DWS solves the problems of excessive congestion due to unresponsive flows and TCP incompatible flows. Different weight functions may be chosen for different reward-penalty profiles.
By: Rahul Garg, Abhinav Kamra, Varun Khurana
Published in: RI01005 in 2001
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