MULTIUSER RATE-BASED FLOW-CONTROL

Flow and congestion control allow the users of a telecommunication net work to regulate the traffic that they send into the network in accord ance with the quality of service that they require. Flow control may b e performed by the network, as Ls the case in asynchronous transfer mo de (ATM) networks (the available bit rate (ABR) transfer capacity), or by the users themselves, as is the case in the Internet [transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP)]. We study in this paper both situations using optimal control and dynamic game techniques. The first situation leads to the formulation of a dynamic team problem, w hile the second one leads to a dynamic noncooperative game, for which we establish the existence and uniqueness of a linear Nash equilibrium and obtain a characterization of the corresponding equilibrium polici es along with the performance costs. We further show that when the use rs update their policies in a greedy manner, not knowing a priori the utilities of the other players, the sequence of policies thus generate d converges to the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we study an extension of the model that accommodates multiple traffic types for each user,,vit h the switching from one type of traffic to another being governed by a Markov jump process. Presentation of some numerical results compleme nts this study.