Quality of Service Provision in Noncooperative Network Environments
Ki‐Hong Park, Meera Sitharam, Shaogang Chen · Purdue e-Pubs (Purdue University System) · 1997
This paper presents a study of the quality of service provision problem in noncooperative network environments where applications or users are assumed to behave in a selfish way. Our contributions are threefold. First, we formulate a model of QoS provision in noncooperative network environments and present a comprehensive game-theoretic analysis of its properties. We give a complete characterization of Nash equilibria and show under what conditions they are system optimal. We show that, in general, Nash equilibria need not be system optimal nor Pareto, and gaps exist to separate the three classes in nontrivial ways. However, for "resource-plentiful" systems, we show that Nash equilibria, Pareto optima, and system optima all coincide, collapsing into a single class. Second, we investigate the problem of facilitating effective quality of service provision in systems with multi-dimensional QoS vectors containing both mean- and variance-related QoS measures. We extend the game-theoretic an...