Incentives and Pricing in Communications Networks

This chapter studies the problem of decentralized resource allocation among competing users in communication networks. The growth in the scale of communication networks and the newly emerging interactions between administrative domains and end-users with different needs and quality of service requirements necessitate new approaches to the modeling and control of communication networks that recognize the difficulty of formulating and implementing centralized control protocols for resource allocation. The current research in this area has developed a range of such approaches. Central to most of these approaches is the modeling of end-users and sometimes also of service providers as self-interested agents that make decentralized and selfish decisions. This research has two important implications: