Title

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

Authors

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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