Making Greed Work in Networks: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Gateway Service (extended uhstrcrctl SC/Ill ShCIlliel~ Xerox PARC 3333 Coyote Hill Road f alo Alto, CA 93303 Disciplines 1. Introduction There has been much recent. interest. in the phenomenon of congestion in computer networks, Many of the proposed congestion control schemes assume the cooperation of network users, requiring them to implement a particular How control algorithm. This paper takes a rather different approach, investigating congestion control from a gametheoretic perspective. The central tenet of this perspective is that users are independent entities, selfish in nature, :tnd not suljject to central control. The network, in this view, is merely a provider of service to the community of independent users. The goal is to design the network so that it will deliver good service in spite of selfish user behavior. We contend that the notion of user selfishness, rather than being of merely theoretical interest, may indeed be the best way to ensure adequate performance in large, evolving networks. We apply this game-theoretic pcrspcctivc to a very simple s,vstem: a single gatewa.v shared b,y N users. Each user sends a Poisson stream of packets through the gateway. The rate of
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/making-greed-work-in-networks-a-game-theoretic-analysis-of-gateway-urQ09itGNw