Existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium in the non-cooperative QoS routing

Abstract

Researchers dealing with game theoretic issues are well aware that the definition of a model capturing some physical behaviours such as the routing, the pricing, the flow and congestion control, the admission control just to mention some examples in the telecommunication field, is a difficult task, but it is only half of the overall effort. As a matter of fact, a key aspect is the analysis of the equilibrium (or equilibria) towards which the game will (hopefully) converge. The existence, the uniqueness, the efficiency and the structure of the equilibrium are some of the typical properties which are investigated. In this article, we propose a game theoretic model for quality of service (QoS) routing in networks implementing a Differentiated Service model for the QoS support. In particular, we focus on a parallel link network model and we consider a non-cooperative joint problem of QoS routing and dynamic capacity allocation. For this model, we demonstrate that the Nash equilibrium exists, so overcoming a typical problem in the existence proofs appeared in many papers in the area of routing game since 1990s, and we explicitly obtain a suitable set of relations characterising its structure. Moreover, we prove that Nash equilibrium uniqueness cannot be guaranteed in general.