Pricing and Rate Adaptation in a Non-Cooperative Environment

Abstract— We consider a price-based rate control scheme that has been proposed by Kelly et al.. However, rather than assuming that users adapt their transmission rates by mandate, we study the situation where users choose transmission rates to maximize their net benefit at each time step. Extending a result obtained by Ganesh et al., we show that in the single link case the system again converges to the equilibrium bandwidth allocation of Kelly et al.. This result suggests that price-based rate control scheme proposed by Kelly et al. is also effective when users behave in a selfish manner.