Incentive compatibility and dynamics of congestion control
P. Brighten Godfrey, Michael Schapira, Aviv Zohar, Scott J. Shenker · 2010
his paper studies under what conditions congestion control schemes can be both efficient, so that capacity is not wasted, and incentive compatible, so that each participant can maximize its utility by following the prescribed protocol. We show that both conditions can be achieved if routers run strict priority queueing (SPQ) or weighted fair queueing (WFQ) and end-hosts run any of a family of protocols which we call Probing Increase Educated Decrease (PIED). A natural question is whether incentive compatibility and efficiency are possible while avoiding the per-flow processing of WFQ. We partially address that question in the negative by showing that any policy satisfying a certain "locality" condition cannot guarantee both properties.