A Non-Monetary Mechanism for Optimal Rate Control Through Efficient Cost Allocation

Abstract

This paper proposes a practical non-monetary mechanism that induces the efficient solution to the optimal rate control problem, where each client optimizes its request arrival rate to maximize its own net utility individually, and at the Nash Equilibrium the total net utility of the system is also maximized. Existing mechanisms typically rely on monetary exchange which requires additional infrastructure that is not always available. Instead, the proposed mechanism is based on efficient cost allocation, where the cost is in terms of non-monetary metric, such as average delay or request loss rate. Specifically, we present an efficient cost allocation rule for the server to determine the target cost of each client. We then propose an intelligent policy for the server to control the costs of the clients to achieve the efficient allocation. Furthermore, we design a distributed rate control protocol with provable convergence to the Nash Equilibrium of the system. The effectiveness of our mechanism is extensively evaluated via simulations of both delay allocation and loss rate allocation against baseline mechanisms with classic control policies.