Multi-user flow control as a Nash game: performance of various algorithms

Abstract

In Altman and Basar (1998), a dynamic game model of rate-based flow control was introduced, capturing a scenario in a telecommunication network where M users share a common bottleneck queue. For such a model, existence of dynamic Nash equilibria was studied, and various algorithms were proposed for its computation. In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive numerical study of various algorithms that arise in this context, and also address the more general case where the performance measure also assigns cost to jitter, that is to variations in the transmission rate.