Fair end-to-end window-based congestion control
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Efficiency Loss in a Network Resource Allocation Game
Mathematics of Operations Research
Matrix games in the multicast networks: maximum information flows with network switching
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) - Special issue on networking and information theory
Dice: a game theoretic framework for wireless multipath network coding
Proceedings of the 9th ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing
XORs in the air: practical wireless network coding
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Min-Cost Selfish Multicast With Network Coding
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
A scalable network resource allocation mechanism with bounded efficiency loss
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Competition in Parallel-Serial Networks
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Network Coding Games with Unicast Flows
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Reliability-based rate allocation in wireless inter-session network coding systems
GLOBECOM'09 Proceedings of the 28th IEEE conference on Global telecommunications
Rate control with pairwise intersession network coding
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
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A common assumption in the network coding literature is that the users are cooperative and will not pursue their own interests. However, this assumption can be violated in practice. In this paper, we analyze inter-session network coding in a wired network, assuming that the users are selfish and act as strategic players to maximize their own utility. We prove the existence of Nash equilibria for a wide range of utility functions. The number of Nash equilibria can be large (even infinite) under certain conditions, which is in sharp contrast to a similar game setting with traditional packet forwarding. We then characterize the worst-case efficiency bounds, i.e., the price-of-anarchy (PoA), compared to an optimal and cooperative network design. We show that by using a novel discriminatory pricing scheme that charges encoded and forwarded packets differently, we can improve PoA in comparison with the case where a single pricing scheme is being used. However, PoA is still worse than the case when network coding is not applied. This implies that intersession network coding is more sensitive to strategic behavior. For example, for the case where only two network coding flows share a single bottleneck link, the efficiency at certain Nash equilibria can be as low as 48%. These results generalize the well-known result of guaranteed 67% efficiency bounds shown by Johari and Tsitsiklis for traditional packet forwarding networks.