Fair bandwidth sharing in distributed systems: A game-theoretic approach

    Authors

    S. Rakshit;R. K. Guha

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    IEEE Trans. Comput.

    Keywords

    distributed systems; local area networks; fair bandwidth share; selfish; users; game theory; SENSE MULTIPLE-ACCESS; LOCAL AREA NETWORKS; CSMA-CD; PERFORMANCE; Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture; Engineering, Electrical &; Electronic

    Abstract

    Fair sharing of bandwidth remains an unresolved issue for distributed systems. In this paper, the users of a distributed LAN are modeled as selfish users with independence to choose their individual strategies. With these selfish users, the contention-based distributed medium access scenario is modeled as a complete-information, noncooperative game, designated the "Access Game." A novel MAC strategy based on p-persistent CSMA is presented to achieve fairness in the "Access Game." It is proven that there are an infinite number of Nash Equilibria for the "Access Game," but they do not result in fairness. Therefore, it may be beneficial for the selfish users to adhere to a set of constraints that result in fairness in a noncooperative fashion. This leads to the formulation of a constrained " Access Game" with fairness represented as a set of algebraic constraints. It is proven that the solution of the constrained game, the Constrained Nash Equilibrium, is unique. Further, it is shown that, in addition to achieving fairness, this solution also optimizes the throughput. Finally, these results are extended to a more realistic incomplete-information scenario by approximating the incomplete-information scenario as a complete-information scenario through information gathering and dissemination.

    Journal Title

    Ieee Transactions on Computers

    Volume

    54

    Issue/Number

    11

    Publication Date

    1-1-2005

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    1384

    Last Page

    1393

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000231890700005

    ISSN

    0018-9340

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