The linear saturated decentralized strategy for constrained flow control is asymptotically optimal

Abstract

We present an algorithm for constrained network flow control in the presence of an unknown demand. Our algorithm is decentralized in the sense that it is implemented by a team of agents, each controlling just the flow on a single arc of the network based only on the buffer levels at the nodes at the extremes of the arc, while ignoring the actions of other agents and the network topology. We prove that our algorithm is also stabilizing and steady-state optimal. Specifically, we show that it asymptotically produces the minimum-norm flow. We finally generalize our algorithm to networks with a linear dynamics and we prove that certain least-square optimality properties still hold.