Intervention with Complete and Incomplete Information: Application to Flow Control

Abstract

Most congestion control schemes are based on user cooperation, i.e., they implicitly assume that users are willing to share their private information and to take actions such that the network operates efficiently. However, a self-interested and strategic user might exploit such schemes to obtain an individual gain at the expenses of the other users, misrepresenting its private information and overusing the resources. We first quantify the inefficiency of the network in the presence of selfish users for two different scenario: in the complete information case - in which the users have no private information - and in the incomplete information case - in which the users have private information. Then, we ask whether the congestion control scheme can be designed to be robust to self-interested strategic users. To reach this objective, we use an intervention scheme. For the complete information scenario we describe a scheme that is able to give the users an incentive to optimally use the resources. For the incomplete information scenario we describe two schemes that provide the users with an incentive to report truthfully and to use the resources efficiently, although not always optimally. Illustrative results show that the considered schemes can considerably improve the efficiency of the network.