The designer's perspective to atomic noncooperative networks

In noncooperative networks, resources are shared among selfish users, which optimize their individual performance measure. Traditional design methods tend to perform poorly in such net networks, as they do not take into accou nt the inherent noncooperative nature of the network users, Such networks r equire specialized design techniques in order to achieve efficient utilizat ion of resources. We consider the generic and practically important class o f atomic resource sharing networks, in which traffic bifurcation is not imp lemented, hence each user allocates its whole traffic to one of the network resources. We investigate topologies of parallel resources within a game-t heoretic framework and establish the foundations of a design and management methodology that enables operation of such networks efficiently, despite b oth the lack of cooperation among users and the restrictions imposed by ato mic resource sharing. We study various problems pertaining to capacity allo cation, pricing, and admission control, and show that their solutions are s ubstantially different from those corresponding to traditional networks.