Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Congestion Control: Optimality and Stability

When heterogeneous congestion control protocols that react to different pricing signals share the same network, the current theory based on utility maximization fails to predict the network behavior. The pricing signals can be different types of signals such as packet loss, queueing delay, etc, or different values of the same type of signal such as different ECN marking values based on the same actual link congestion level. Unlike in a homogeneous network, the bandwidth allocation now depends on router parameters and flow arrival patterns. It can be non-unique, suboptimal and unstable. In Tang et al. ("Equilibrium of heterogeneous congestion control: Existence and uniqueness," IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw., vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 824

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TON
• Authors: Ao Tang, X. Wei, Stephen H. Low, Mung Chiang
• Keywords: Bandwidth Allocation, Heterogeneous Congestion Control, Router Parameters, TON 2010