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Congestion Pricing and a Distributed Game
Overview
We are looking at novel ways of controlling a network by using Congestion Pricing to achieve differential QoS. Signals are related to shadow prices, the marginal cost of congestion, and fed back to the user. The users are free to react as they chose, but will incur 'charges' when resources are congested, so in effect the users are playing a 'game' against the network. A simulated environment has been constructed which allows users to compete against each other, where a user might be a software algorithm or agent, or could be a real person! A natural application area is the Internet, where the different algorithms can be likened to TCP variants or Flow Control schemes. This is a cross-discipline project, involving collaboration with the Statistical Laboratory and others at Cambridge University. The Basic Problem
Congestion is a problem for networks, particularly the current Internet. It is possible to encourage users to co-operate and at the same time allow differential QoS? We claim that it is, and one way to do this is to send back signals that are congestion prices. So when there is no congestion, this price is zero, but increases with congestion. This gives incentives to the users to back-off when the network is overloaded, and allows those willing to pay more to get more. The necessary feedback mechanisms could be simply implemented in a router. The ECN proposals in the IETF are similar in spirit. People within Microsoft Research Cambridge
An ECN-based end-to-end congestion-control framework: experiments and evaluation, Koenraad Lavens, Peter Key and Derek McAuley, Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-2000-104, October 2000, Postscript (593KB), PDF (159 KB) Dynamics of congestion pricing Ayalvadi Ganesh, Koenraad Laevens and Richard Steinberg (University of Cambridge), Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2000-70, June 2000. User policies in a network implementing congestion pricing Peter Key and Laurent Massoulie, Workshop on Internet Service Quality Economics (ISQE) Cambridge, MA, USA December 2-3, 1999. Slides The use of games to assess user strategies for differential Quality of Service in the Internet, Richard Gibbens (Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge) and Peter Key, Dec. 1999 ISQE Slides Distributed Admission Control Peter Key with Frank Kelly (Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge) and Stan Zachary(Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh)October 1999, Submitted for publication Service Differentiation: Congestion Pricing, Brokers and Bandwidth Futures, Peter Key NOSSDAV99 Word (66KB) PDF(21KB) PowerPoint slides (855KB) Differential QoS and Pricing in Networks: where flow-control meets game theory, Peter Key and Derek McAuley. Published in IEE Proceedings Software, Vol 146, No 2, March 1999. Abstract Congestion Pricing for Congestion Avoidance, Peter Key, Derek McAuley, Paul Barham, Koenraad Lavens, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-99-15, Feb 1999. Abstract, PostScript, PDF. Impact of fairness on Internet performance, Thomas Bonald (France Telecom) and Laurent Massoulie, submitted to ACM Sigmetrics 2001. Stability of distributed congestion control with heterogeneous feedback delays, Laurent Massoulie, Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2000-111.
Distributed Control and Resource Pricing, with Richard Gibbens (Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge) Online version of a tutorial given at Sigcomm 2000 Congestion Pricing: A Testbed Implementation, Neil Stratford, Multi-Service Networks 2000, PDF, PowerPoint Distributed Admission Control and Congestion Pricing, Peter Key,Powerpoint(2.21MB), Workshop on Pricing and Quality of ServiceENST Paris - 23,24 September 1999 Is the Internet Unstable? Laurent Massoulie, Powerpoint May 1999 Bandwidth sharing: objectives and algorithms, Laurent Massoulie with Jim Roberts, Powerpoint IEEE INFOCOM, New York 1999 Fairness, Flow Control and Multi-User Games, Peter Key, Coseners 1998 , Online , PowerPoint slides , PDF version, Fixed Point Models & Congestion Pricing for TCP and Related Schemes,Peter Key, Paris 1998 , Online, PDF slides,
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