A Fully Cooperative Network

Abstract

A charging scheme and a flow control scheme are designed for a fully cooperative network by using a new concept of generalized Nash equilibrium that is based on an assumption that each player is wise and intends to minimize instead of maximize his/her expected utility payoff (or maximize the opponent's utility payoff). In our scheme, each link will increase its price when the system is under-loaded, and decrease its price when the system is over-loaded. On the other hand, the sending rate of each source is a monotonous non-decreasing function of the price, i.e., each source will increase transmission rate when the price does not fall and decrease transmission rate when the price falls. Clearly, our scheme is different from existing network framework that is based on the conventional microeconomic system. With our scheme, the network is harmonious in the sense that besides all sources cooperate with each other, sources and links are also cooperative with each other. This distinguishes our scheme from existing cooperative scheme in the sense that in the existing schemes, only sources are cooperative with each other. With our scheme, each link has an incentive to increase its capacity because it can get more profit. This is very helpful for the evolution of the Internet