The designer's perspective to atomic noncooperative networks

Abstract

In noncooperative networks, resources are shared among selfish users, which optimize their individual performance measure. Traditional design methods tend to perform poorly in such networks, as they do not take into account the inherent noncooperative nature of the network users. Such networks require specialized design techniques in order to achieve efficient utilization of resources. We consider the generic and practically important class of atomic resource sharing networks, in which traffic bifurcation is not implemented, hence each user allocates its whole traffic to one of the network resources. We investigate topologies of parallel resources within a game-theoretic framework and establish the foundations of a design and management methodology that enables operation of such networks efficiently, despite both the lack of cooperation among users and the restrictions imposed by atomic resource sharing. We study various problems pertaining to capacity allocation, pricing, and admission control, and show that their solutions are substantially different from those corresponding to traditional networks.