Incentive mechanisms for smoothing out a focused demand for network resources

Authors:
Kevin Leyton-Brown;Ryan Porter;Balaji Prabhakar;Yoav Shoham;Shobha Venkataraman
Affiliations:
Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA;Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA;Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA;Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA;Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Venue:
Computer Communications
Year:
2003

Citing 7
Cited 0

Random early detection gateways for congestion avoidance

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
TCP and explicit congestion notification

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
Pricing the Internet

Public access to the Internet
Making greed work in networks: a game-theoretic analysis of switch service disciplines

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Smoothing out focused demand for network resources

Proceedings of the 3rd ACM conference on Electronic Commerce
A Modest Proposal for Preventing Internet Congestion

A Modest Proposal for Preventing Internet Congestion
Resource pricing and the evolution of congestion control

Automatica (Journal of IFAC)

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.24

Visualization

Abstract

We explore the problem of sharing network resources when users' preferences lead to temporally concentrated loads, resulting in an inefficient use of the network. In such cases external incentives can be supplied to smooth out demand, obviating the need for expensive technological mechanisms. Taking a game-theoretic approach, we consider a setting in which bandwidth or access to service is available during different time slots at a fixed cost, but all agents have a natural preference for choosing the same time slot. We present four mechanisms that motivate users to distribute the load by probabilistically waiving the cost for each time slot, and analyze the equilibria that arise under these mechanisms.