Intelligent Flow Control under a Game Theoretic Framework

Abstract

Each of us is interested in optimization, and telecommunications. Via several meetings, conferences, chats, and other opportunities, we have discovered these joint interests and decided to put together this book.It certainly wasn't easy. What made it difficult is partly the reason for this book in the first place: things are moving fast! As researchers in both industry and academia, we are under constant pressure to keep up with new technologies and opportunities. Part of our day jobs involves developing good algorithms for a steady surge of new problems arising from industry. Another part of our day jobs involves finding realistic problems which might yield to some of the algorithms we have developed, which we particularly like, but which don't work on anything else. The remainder of our day jobs tends to involve lecturing (for two of us), project management (for all of us), and things like exam-setting and marking. Finally, for two of us, childcare takes up a substantial part of our night jobs. Naturally, the book was finished when we worked out how to stuff 46 hours into a single day, and keep that up for a few successive weeks.Seriously, though, telecommunicatons is growing and changing very quickly, and all of this involves the increasing availability of new real-world problems for optimization researchers to address. Telecommunications engineers tend to know all about the problems involved, but are often not aware of developments in computer science and artificial intelligence which might go a long way towards solving those problems. We therefore argue, at the beginning of Chapter 1, that there needs to be more collaboration between the communities, so that both sides can be equipped for the challenges ahead. Indeed, this book is the result of one such collaboration.We have oriented it slightly towards the telecommunications engineer who knows little about the computational techniques, rather than the other way around. This is mainly because it is much easier to describe the techniques than it is to describe the telecommunications issues; the latter is a much larger collection. However, individual chapters go into some detail, often at an introductory level, in describing particular kinds of problem. Also, we provide a brief introduction to the essence of the problems at the beginning of each part.Let us know what you think. In particular, if you are a telecommunications engineer, and have been inspired by a chapter or two in this book to try out some techniques that you otherwise wouldn't have, please get in touch: your story may make it into the next edition!

Multi-bid auctions for bandwidth allocation in communication networks

“…To do so, it would be of interest to consider that players have beliefs (a priori probability distributions, as in [20]) on the number of users in the game and on their preferences, in order to deduce a probability distribution of the pseudo-market pricē u. (In this sense, the auction game can be seen as a game with population uncertainty [21].)…”

Pricing the Internet With Multibid Auctions

“…• players may have beliefs (meaning a priori probability distributions, as in [32]) on the number of users in the game and on their preferences. From this knowledge, a probability distribution of the pseudo-market priceū can be computed.…”

“…Equation (32) implies that D (k) ≥ 0 for all k such thatū (k) > 0, and consequently for all k ≤ K − 1 sinceū (K) ≥ 0.…”

Quantity-based flow control strategy for connection-oriented communication networks

“…A good survey on earlier data flow control schemes is presented in [1]. Afterwards, various control strategies, employing artificial intelligence [2][3][4], fuzzy logic [5], game theory [6,7] and other approaches, were proposed. Furthermore, it is worth notifying that the communication network can be modelled as a time-delay control system.…”